iMac DV hard drive requirements?

Question

iMac DV hard drive requirements?

I've inherited an iMac DV 400MHz from friend after it died. I tried diagnosing the problem and reinstalled Mac OS 9 but it had problems. I installed a hard drive I salvaged from a PC that was being recycled and successfully installed OS 9 but the iMac had difficulties installing OS X. OS 9 acted weird -- like running extremely slow and the HD chattered continuously. I decided the problem was likely with the logic board so I purchased a used logic board on eBay. With the new logic board, I found it impossible to install Mac OS X (Panther or Tiger) because whenever I restarted from the CD I got the dreaded Prohibitory Sign (circle-slash). After checking the discussions on this symbol, I wondered if the problem now was with the hard drive so I switched it back to the original hard drive. Voila! It works great now. Apparently, the iMac rejected the new hard drive for some reason.

Now here's my question. I want to expand the hard drive capacity and install a much bigger model. Is there something I need to look for when selecting a hard drive? I thought any ATA hard drive would work with this model iMac. Please advise.

iMac DV 400MHz, Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Posted on Feb 14, 2006 9:31 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Jeff

Level 6

12,058 points

Feb 14, 2006 11:58 PM in response to Andrew White2

Because your iMac DV's IDE controller lacks 48 LBA capability, it can't take advantage of the mega-sized drives available today. It can recognize a maximum of 128 GBs of formatted hard drive, so that effectively leaves you with the option of installing a drive that's 120 GBs or less. Some have installed larger capacity drives, and settled with a portion of it being unrecognized. You can use any of the mainstream IDE/E-IDE hard drives that are carried by electronics, office supply, and computer stores in your area, such as Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi, Samsung, etc. Staples has the Maxtor 100 GB drive sale-priced at $60 this week, and many of these "100 GB" drives are actually 120 GBs (additional 20 GB capacity is indicated on specially-marked boxes). The drive needs to be jumpered as "master," and should be formatted as a Mac OS Extended (HFS+) volume and (if desired) partitioned into multiple, smaller volumes. As for the drive that you salvaged from the PC, it had probably reached the end of its service life, judging from the sounds that you heard it making. If it were 100% functional, it should have worked fine in the iMac, as long as Drive Setup/Disk Utility recognized it for formatting.

Reply

Answer 2

Feb 22, 2006 6:33 PM in response to Jeff

Aside from a modern operating system, the two components that have accelerated my iMac are the 8MB Cache 7200 rpm Seagate with Fluid Dynamic Bearings (FDB), and having adequate memory.

Watch out for low-ball drive prices as they may be clearing out their 2MB Cache drives. The FDB in english just means that the drive is very (but not completely) quiet. For the drive you select, you can get the jumper settings from the manufacturers web site or they may be in the box.

The second factor is memory. As I am writing this, OS 10.4.5, Firefox 1.5, and with iTunes streaming an Internet radio station, I am using about 315MB ram. I show in activity monitor that I have about 700+ MB free. It is likely that if I also had MS Word open too, I might be banging against a 512MB memory constraint. I splurged - it cost $129 for 1GB memory.

Hope your upgrade goes well. Mine feels like a whole new machine.

Regards,

Chuck

Reply

Answer 3

Feb 24, 2006 6:32 PM in response to Andrew White2

Thank you all for the responses.

I purchased a Samsung 160GB PATA OEM drive from MicroCenter for $79. After installing it everything seemed to be humming along then, while loading some CDs (via iTunes), it froze. I restarted it and ran DiskWarrior. DiskWarrior ran for a short time than stopped with an error that it had become disconnected. Disconnected from what? I have no idea. I tried this a couple of more times but it did this again. Wondering if there might be a bad sector on the new drive, I booted the iMac from a Panther CD in order to run DiskUtility.

It does a normal Erase and Partition just fine. But if I run Erase and have it write zeros, it gets about half way through the process (as seen via the status bar) then freezes there. Several attempts at this produced the same effect. At this point, I'm totally perplexed!

This machine has a replaced logic board (with processor) and brand new hard drive. Any suggestions?

Reply

Answer 4

Jeff

Level 6

12,058 points

Feb 25, 2006 2:52 AM in response to Andrew White2

As long as you erased and formatted it with Disk Utility, you shouldn't have any problems when writing zeros. Did you partition it into multiple volumes? When I've had hard drives that failed Drive Setup's "Test Disk" option or NUM's media scan, they would usually hang the system. I had a similar problem last year with an out-of-warranty Samsung 40 GB drive. Everything would be running fine, and then without warning, the system would abruptly hang. Suspecting a bad hard drive, I checked it for media damage. Shortly into the testing process, it would hang the system. Judging by the amount of time before problems occurred during testing, I partitioned the drive into (3) volumes, setting the first (problem area) partition at 2 GBs, and the other two evenly dividing the remaining formatted space. Using Drive Setup under OS 9.2.2, I deselected "automount on startup" for the first partition, which removed it from the desktop and made it a non-issue. I installed the OS on the second partition, and everything has been running smoothly since, without a single hang or freeze. If your drive was purchased recently, I'd erase it again and return it to MicroCenter for a replacement.

Reply