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jilpoked
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Q: G4 IDE SSD

I purchased my emac five years ago and it has performed beautifully, one caveat, hard drive failure. First HDD replaced just over 1 year ago. Last month began having problems ie; slow booting, spinning beach ball. I schleped it to a local tech. He installed a newer Leopard OS. It worked fine for about 3 weeks then the same problems appeared, tech recommends a new HDD. As the price point on SSDs' have come down, I opted to purchase the SSD and install it myself. The expenditure, over a tech installed HDD, being a push. With the long life of the SSD I'd have it made.
I purchased a 2.5" 128gb SSD with the IDE PATA interface. I used an IDE to USB adaptor to first format the SSD then Super Duper to clone my HDD onto the SSD via the adaptor. Upon completion super duper said that I had a bootable clone. I then installed the SSD into my emac. This is where the story takes a sad turn, you may want to get a box of kleenex before reading on!
Emac will not boot from the SSD. I just get the small flashing question mark folder. From the install disc Disk Utility I tried a restore from the old HDD to SSD over the IDE to USB adaptor. The transfer took over an hour but stopped with message "Restore failure(2)error occurred while copying(no such file or directory.) Decided to do a clean install of the OS. I booted from the install disc and when asked the install destination, was able to select the SSD icon even though it sported a red octagon with an exclamation point inside. I selected the SSD and was given message "you cannot install Mac OSX on this volume. Mac OSX cannot start up from this volume".
I boot in safe mode and am informed of a 'panic' stating "Unable find driver for this platform" In the Disk Utility, when I select the SSD and click on the 'info' button, it shows, among other descriptors, "NO:Mac OS9 drivers installed". My Disk Utility does not offer the option of installing OS9 drivers. If it did, would that cure my problem and let me install the Mac OSX software and boot from the SSD?
I am in contact with the SSD manufacturer, they think it should work in my mac, but they are still checking. If anyone can make sense of this and offer assistance I would be much obliged.

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emac, Mac OS X (10.4), 1.47GHz G4, 1G ram

Posted on Jun 17, 2010 6:43 PM

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jilpoked

Q: G4 IDE SSD

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  • by Király,

    Király Király Jun 19, 2010 8:20 PM in response to jilpoked
    Level 6 (9,833 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jun 19, 2010 8:20 PM in response to jilpoked
    eMacs cannot boot from any USB devices. You will have to get an external enclosure for your IDE drive that has a FireWire connection, or get an Apple certified repair shop to install the IDE drive in your eMac for you.

  • by jilpoked,

    jilpoked jilpoked Jun 22, 2010 11:28 AM in response to jilpoked
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jun 22, 2010 11:28 AM in response to jilpoked
    Thank you for your response. After struggling with the issue for several days and conferring with the manufacturer I began to wonder if I had been shipped a dead or failed SSD. Pulled the offending device and plugged it into my sons PC. Within a few minutes it was formatted, reading and writing. OK, the SSD is good. Plugged it back into the eMac. Booted from the install disc and selected the Disk Utility. Erased and formatted to 'Mac OS Extended(journaled)'. Set 'Partition' at one and saw that the pop-up menu read "MS-DOS', the only other offering was 'free space'. I didn't want that pesky MS-DOS so I set the pop-up menu to 'free space' and clicked 'partition'. The partitioning started then quit with a drop down message "failed due to...". Not sure, I decided to erase and format the SSD again. After, I selected the SSD and clicked 'info' which showed the SSD as being correctly formatted. Quit the Disk Utility and began OS install. At the 'Select Destination' step the SSD icon had the prettiest green arrow I have ever seen! The OS installed without a hitch and I am writing this on my 'Solid State Drive' equipped eMac!
    I do not know why I was having so much trouble previously, but I'm leaning towards the 'inter-dimensional demon witch' theory.
    With this new SSD I am hoping that annual hard drive failures are over. It really is something to launch safari and have the it fully loaded in six seconds! Other apps are just as fast.