B Lee

Q: Ext. HD not working on G4 Powermac - hopeless cause?

I've been doing maitanence on my older computers recently - what fun ;- /

 

So I bought an external drive to back up my two G4 computers (a powerbook and a Sawtooth - 450 Ghz AGP graphics). The drive is a G Drive Mini Firewire 800/400 USB 2.  The powerbook is running OS 10.4 and the Sawtooth is running OS 9.2.2.

 

Using Tiger, I was able to format the drive with OS 9 drivers and to partition it to sizes managable for the Sawtooth.

 

I cloned the HD of the powerbook onto the external HD with no problem.

 

HOWEVER - when I began to try backing up the Sawtooth using a partition of about 100 GB, the HDD stalls out and I get this notice:

 

"A firewire drive has stopped responding. The problem must be corrected to prevent damaging the disk's contents. Please check all firewire connections. If you added or removed or turned a Firewire device on or off, try undoing what you did"

 

In trying to run various diagnostics, some things test out OK (was able to run disk first aid) and the System profiler did show the external drives as being mounted. However, the drive utility showed the firewire drive as 'unsupported'.

 

I called G Drive tech support and they said the  minimum requirements for this drive are OSX 5 and it won't work with OS 9. To be honest I had thought the 'requirement' was just in regards to the pre-installed software and if I reformatted it it for OS 9 it would function.

 

Since the person I spoke to at G Drive seemed to have no experience with older computers, I thought I would double check for possible work-arounds to getting this drive to work, or suggestions for finding a new Ext. drive that will work with this computer and OS 9.

 

 

Thanks!

G4 Sawtooth 450, Mac OS 9.2.x

Posted on May 16, 2014 10:35 AM

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Q: Ext. HD not working on G4 Powermac - hopeless cause?

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  • by BDAqua,Helpful

    BDAqua BDAqua May 16, 2014 12:04 PM in response to B Lee
    Level 10 (123,775 points)
    May 16, 2014 12:04 PM in response to B Lee

    Hi,

     

    I suspect the problem is that newer drives use 4096 Byte Sectors instead of the original 512 Byte Sectors, the oldest OS that can handle Advanced Format is 10.4.11 I believe.

     

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_format

  • by B Lee,

    B Lee B Lee May 16, 2014 3:16 PM in response to BDAqua
    Level 1 (30 points)
    Apple TV
    May 16, 2014 3:16 PM in response to BDAqua

    Thanks - that may very well be the problem (but I hope not!).

     

    But geesh - I don't usually see 'byte sectors' listed in the specs for hard drives -  if anyone has experience with new drives that work with OS 9 I would appreciate hearing about it.

     

    I have an old Lacie External drive with other stuff on it I could transer to another drive and use it as my main backup for the Sawtooth I guess, but I really would like to not have to trust it and find a new drive that will work.

  • by BDAqua,

    BDAqua BDAqua May 16, 2014 3:22 PM in response to B Lee
    Level 10 (123,775 points)
    May 16, 2014 3:22 PM in response to B Lee

    I'm pretty sure all new dtives have those big sectors.