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installing a second hard drive

Hi all,

I found a working G4 in the trash. Monitor, mouse, keyboard and all.
I opened it up to find a 9 gig startup drive and 64 Megs of ram. I
added 512 megs from an old PC which it recognized right away.
However, I tried to install a 100 g Maxtor in the secondary drive bay
and no matter what I do, it doesn't appear. Not in Drive Setup or System
Profiler. I have tried different jumper settings and consulted several
online guides but It simply won't see the drive.

It's running OS 9.0.2

Any Thought?

Powermac G4, Mac OS 9.0.x

Posted on Mar 4, 2010 9:37 AM

Reply
9 replies

Mar 4, 2010 9:46 AM in response to LL7777

Hi, LL7777 -

Assuming the 9GB drive in the machine is the original, that would mean the machine is either a G4 (PCI) or a G4 (AGP) model; all later machines came with minimum drives bigger than that.

This means that any drives connected to the built-in ATA cable must be jumpered using the Master and Slave settings; Cable Select will not work.

When two drives are present on the built-in bus, one should be jumpered as Master, the other as Slave; which is which is not important.

If the original drive is a Western Digital, it may be set to a third position, Single, which is used on many WD drives when there is no second drive. When a second drive is added in such a case, the original must be re-jumpered such that one drive is set to Master and the other is set to Slave.

It is also a good idea to reset PRAM after making hardware changes to a machine. This forces the Mac to rescan all the hardware, and to 'notice' the changes.
Article #HT1379 - How to Reset PRAM and NVRAM

Mar 4, 2010 9:53 AM in response to Limnos

the original drive seems to be jumpered as "master". I also tried it in Cable select, with newer drive also in Cable select. I'm not sure how I might verify the IDE cable. It seems like it should be ok as it is the same cable that connects to the startup drive but I haven't got a spare around.

Mar 4, 2010 11:53 AM in response to LL7777

Hi, LL7777 -

Be sure you also connected the power cable to the new drive.

I note you show OS 9 as the operating system. Even though the new drive does not appear on the desktop, have you run Drive Setup (one of the standard OS 9 utilities) to see if the new drive appears in its list? If it does, then select the drive and then initialize it. A drive must be initialized (formatted) before OS 9 can see it. When asked, select Mac OS Extended as the format.

It would not hurt to do a deep wipe of the drive - you can't trust the health of a new drive; it may contain artifacts from manufacturing. Go to the Initiaslize Options item in the Functions menu of Drive Setup, and select Zero All Data before clicking the Initialize button. Note that this may take a while, often about one hour for each 10GB of drive size.
Using Drive Setup

Mar 4, 2010 4:39 PM in response to Don Archibald

Don,

yes I had plugged in the power cable (that's the four pin connector right?). I tried several
different ones. Now, it seems to me that the drive will not power up at all. I even tried removing the
system drive and just plugging the new drive into power and it does not vibrate. I would assume the
drive was dead except that I just pulled it out of a PC in which it has been working fine for a year.
Could it be that this drive simply can't be used with the G4?

And yes, I did run drive setup and nothing appeared except for the original drive and dvd drive.

Having read the +Using Drive Setup+ article you linked to, I noticed it says:
"Never install a new drive without first using Drive Setup or a like-utility to find an empty address."

however I cannot see where it says HOW to find or set up said empty adress.

thanks for your help so far!

Mar 4, 2010 5:42 PM in response to LL7777

Well!!

After all that, I found a western digital in my closet and tried that one, and it mounted right away.
It's now initialized.

Pretty disturbing, however, that I could have murdered a perfectly good Maxtor simply by carrying in from one machine to another. Oh well....

On to the next challenge which is to make this machine into a viable backup DAW.

Thanks for all the help!!

installing a second hard drive

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