G4 Quicksilver - OS Reinstallation & Drive Capacity Answers Needed

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G4 Quicksilver - OS Reinstallation & Drive Capacity Answers Needed

Hello everyone,

My T-shirt says, "Kick me. I'm a PC." Please to bear with my ignorant questions.

(At least I was reared right -- on the Apple II and the 128 KB Mac.)

Situation: OS X Tiger on my Dad's G4 Quicksilver Tower of Power managed to corrupt itself, so that neither keyboard nor mouse worked. (It is, I am 100% certain, an OS problem and not a hardware problem, because I found that by bolting a secondary Ultra-ATA drive in and putting an OS install on it, the input devices work normally.) So the next step will be to pick up a copy of Leopard and "Archive and Install" the OS to get his G4 mojo back, such as it is. (Then begin using Leopard's Time Machine to prevent future OS corruption episodes.)

Couple of questions have come up around this repair.

1) My Dad really needs some extra backup space, and in the course of looking at options, I stumbled on this Support article, which says that the Quicksilver doesn't support partitions larger than 128GB, because the BootROM isn't built for it. He'd need to be an MDD model to have bigger partitions.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2544

But he already has a 160GB drive installed, and nothing indicates the file system has capped the drive capacity. Is this article out of date?

2) If the Support article is out of date, will an EXTERNAL backup drive as new as a 2TB SATA drive in a USB 2.0 enclosure actually work on this machine, or will the G4 balk? (Perhaps the question is just whether the manufacturer has a driver that works for 10.5 Macs.)

3) As far as "Archive and Install" goes, once I refresh the OS installation, is the OS built so that I can free up space by deleting the entire "archived" OS directory?

Incidentally, Archive and Install is the coolest thing ever. As you all know, if my Dad were a PC, right now he'd be up a creek, having to wipe the entire partition just to reinstall the OS, whereby he would now be experiencing the tedium of backing his files up manually first and reinstalling all his apps. No such nonsense with OS X. Kudos, Apple!

Much obliged for your insights.

Cheers,

a k a

G4 Quicksilver Tower of Power, Mac OS X (10.5.8), Where's my coffee?

Posted on Mar 26, 2010 12:42 PM

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Answer 1

Limnos

Level 10

428,339 points

Mar 26, 2010 1:11 PM in response to a k a

The key element is the bootROM version:

<http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1751707&tstart=90>

I'm working from memory here (which may not be strictly accurate) but I recall a few QS models being borderline. Many (like mine) won't work with a >160GB drive. Actually, they will work but they will only recognize the first 128GB of a large drive. Use System Profiler to check on your ROM version and if your computer is actually using as much drive as you think.

Several ways around the limit, discussed in many topics in this forum.

1) Use an ATA PCI card with large drive capacity.

2) Put the drive in an external enclosure. Almost any newer one will support large drive. Firewire is preferred over USB because you can boot from Firewire with a G4.

3) Use a software solution such as Intech's Speed Tools Hi-Cap driver. Note the drawbacks, to this solution such as if you boot to an installer DVD it won't have the driver on the DVD.

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Answer 2

Mar 26, 2010 1:27 PM in response to a k a

So the next step will be to pick up a copy of Leopard and "Archive and Install" the OS to get his G4 mojo back, such as it is. (Then begin using Leopard's Time Machine to prevent future OS corruption episodes.)

Sometimes an +Archive and Install+ works and other times corruption follows to the new Archive install. If you don't have a backup it's worth a try. otherwise an Erase and Install with the option chosen to +Zero Out+, to map out any bad blocks on the drive, is the way to go. As you know you will lose everything on the drive though.

1) My Dad really needs some extra backup space, and in the course of looking at options, I stumbled on this Support article, which says that the Quicksilver doesn't support partitions larger than 128GB, because the BootROM isn't built for it. He'd need to be an MDD model to have bigger partitions.

Right, you can install a drive larger then 128GB but it will only see 128GB.

Is this article out of date?

No.

2) If the Support article is out of date, will an EXTERNAL backup drive as new as a 2TB SATA drive in a USB 2.0 enclosure actually work on this machine, or will the G4 balk? (Perhaps the question is just whether the manufacturer has a driver that works for 10.5 Macs.)

You can use as big an external you want. This is what I did....

I decided to get a hard drive enclosure after my last Ext. WesternDigital FW drive went south on me. There was no way to replace the drive without ruining the whole unit. I chose the Mercury Elite Pro...highly recommended in my Mac magazines.

The ones from OWC are easy to put drives in, even for a beginner. Easy to understand instructions and they back up their merchandise 100%, no questions asked. Now if a drive goes bad, I can put a new one in the enclosure in minutes (or put a bigger one in). Mine works great!

Then I do this.....clone my system over.

I like the free demo of SuperDuper to make clones. It's free, Tiger&Leopard ready and is easy to use. If you buy the full version you can do incremental backups.

With a clone on an external FireWire drive (USB drives are not bootable on PPC Mac's but most are on Intel Mac's) you can bootup on it to do your repairs or just run your Mac anytime you have trouble with your main drive.

If you partition the external, 128GB for the clone, then you can use the rest of the external drive to store Pictures, music, documents, etc.

3) As far as "Archive and Install" goes, once I refresh the OS installation, is the OS built so that I can free up space by deleting the entire "archived" OS directory?

Yes you can trash the previous install.

Here's Freeing Up Disk Space to help further.

Incidentally, Archive and Install is the coolest thing ever.

Yes!
Dale

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Answer 3

a k a Author

Level 1

0 points

Mar 26, 2010 2:05 PM in response to Dale Weisshaar

Limnos and Dale, these are VERY helpful.

Appears, thankfully, that he's got the magic number when it comes to the BootROM version, so we shouldn't have any problem with drive capacity.

Taking the advice both of you gave, I'll get an external enclosure that has both 1394a and eSATA, likely from Newegg -- that way it'll future-proof my Dad's enclosure. Sadly, that eliminates the sweet OWC enclosures from the running, because they don't seem to have an offering with both Firewire and eSATA that's under $100, when you can get a whole new G4 tower for $100+ on eBay.

There are two follow-ups, now that I know how to move ahead:

1) Do you happen to know off-hand (since I'm not quite as familiar with the nomenclature of the old PATA/IDE generation of interfaces), is Ultra-ATA 133 the fastest drive interface that can be installed INTERNALLY in a Quicksilver? Or would it be worth looking at something like a SCSI?

2) You've cleared up for me the process of OS reinstallation. If I can get to the point of doing a clean install of Leopard, what about migrating the installed apps and docs...?

Does the Apple OS work in such a way that I can grab an app's root directory and copy/paste it to the new drive? Or does it require installation, like Windows? If copy/paste does work, what is the directory structure that I'm looking for?

Are there utilities, either on the Tiger source OS or Leopard destination OS, that will help keep migration from falling into cracks?

I'll be offline for two hours on a run, so will have to mark this as solved and thank anyone who replies this eve. I appreciate your taking a walk-in here at the virtual Genius Bar!

Obrigado,

a k a

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Answer 4

Mar 26, 2010 2:09 PM in response to a k a

Hi, a k a -

Is this article out of date?

Not exactly. It just isn't as clear as it could be.

There are two series of QuickSilver models - the original series, and the 2002 series. The built-in ATA controller on the original machines do not have support for large drives. The QuickSilver '02 models do have large drive support.

You can use this Apple KBase article to identify which you have -
Article #TA25585 - Power Mac G4: How to Differentiate Between Models (part 2)

***

Even on the original series, the limitation applies only to drives connected to the built-in ATA controller. It does not apply to drives connected via firewire, nor to ones connected to an added PCI ATA controller card provided the card has large drive support (aka 48-bit LBA addresing). Most ATA/100, just about all ATA/133, and all SATA cards do support large drives. Note that ATA (or PATA) drives must be used with ATA cards, and SATA drives with SATA cards.

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