[bighill]

people,
about 4 or so months ago my powermac wouldn't get past the grey startup screen with the apple in the middle when booting up. no winding progress round thing, just the grey screen with the apple was as far as you would get. it was decided that my less then 1 year old seagate 300 gig HD was the problem. seagate sent me another and everything was fine. this morning, same deal, computer will not boot past grey screen. i tried to get it to go a bunch, no deal. i'm guessing its the drive again, but what the hell is making this happen? i'm running a quicksilver, dual 800, 1.25 gig of ram, 10.4.10, 300 gig HD. i do some video editing of all different kinds with final cut, have a TON of music, quite a bit of pictures, some spreadsheet/bookkeeping and your basic web browsing and tons of email.

anybody have any ideas why this might be happening? did i get 2 bad drives in a row that take months to fail? from seagate?

I'm trying to make it to the next macpro updates with this system, any help/ideas would be appreciated.
thank you.

[GORDYmac]

Your Dual 800 Quicksilver (2001) does not natively support hard drives larger than 128GB, unless you have purchased a separate card for the 300GB drive.

I can only suspect that critical system files were saved outside of the 128GB limit, which the computer cannot access upon startup. I'm hitting the wall on my knowledge of this matter, so I'll stop there. Look here for more info on this limitation.

I'd suggest buying a smaller drive and starting over. Your Quicksilver should support 3-100GB internal drives without issue, or, buy an external FireWire case and slap the 300GB drive in it.

I have a Quicksilver 933, and I'm also holding on to it as long as I can. Good luck.

[Moonray]

If a machine can’t look beyond the 128 GB limit it can’t save files there either. When formatting the new drive, a Mac with that 128 GB limit won’t format more than it can access and I understand the drive was working fine before.

Bighill: clarify this 128 GB issue, then run Apple’s Disk Utility.app in /Applications/Utilities/ to see if you get any errors reported or fixed. If Disk Utility finds errors that it can’t fix, Alsoft’s DiskWarrior most likely can but will cost you $100.

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[bighill]

i'm sorry that i left out that i installed a PCI to ATA-133 controller card to run bigger drives.
my bad, sorry.

i have not run DU yet, last time it found nothing wrong at all, doesn't mean it won't find something this time.

thanks for responding. anybody else?

[bighill]

nobody has any ideas? i used to count on this site to keep from having to dig around.

where the hell did all the knowledgeable people go?

[Lateralus]

Have you done a permissions repair with the OS X boot disc?

[bighill]

Yeah, I also ran Disk Warrior, no deal. I can't believe another HD is bad, something has to be making this happen.
The drive still has a warranty, but who the hell wants to keep dealing with this and having to talk to someone in India for hours....sorry, I'm venting.

Anyway, thanks.