Possible to identify individual drives in an MDD G4?

Question

Possible to identify individual drives in an MDD G4?

I'd like to take out two of the internal HDs from my MDD G4 to use them in external FW enclosures I bought at a good price to use them on the MacBook and another machine.

Three of the internal drives are nominally 160 GB and identical to each other, the other one is a nominally 380 GB unit.

Is there a way of telling whether the larger drive is in the top bay or the rear bay without taking out both cages? Can the System Profiler help me at all?

ATA:

ATA Bus:

ST3160023A:

Capacity: 149.05 GB

Model: ST3160023A

Revision: 3.06

Serial Number: 3JS2END7

Removable Media: No

Detachable Drive: No

BSD Name: disk1

Protocol: ATA

Unit Number: 0

Socket Type: Internal

OS9 Drivers: Yes

S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported

Volumes:

PhSh_Scratch_1:

Capacity: 149.05 GB

Available: 148.99 GB

Writable: Yes

File System: HFS+

BSD Name: disk1s9

Mount Point: /Volumes/PhSh_Scratch_1

ST3400832A:

Capacity: 372.61 GB

Model: ST3400832A

Revision: 3.03

Serial Number: 5NF0K62P

Removable Media: No

Detachable Drive: No

BSD Name: disk2

Protocol: ATA

Unit Number: 1

Socket Type: Internal

OS9 Drivers: Yes

S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified

Volumes:

Macintosh HD:

Capacity: 372.49 GB

Available: 278.06 GB

Writable: Yes

File System: Journaled HFS+

BSD Name: disk2s10

Mount Point: /

====

<snip> 2 OPTICAL DRIVES <snip>

====

ATA Bus:

ST3160023A:

Capacity: 149.05 GB

Model: ST3160023A

Revision: 3.06

Serial Number: 3JS2DLMJ

Removable Media: No

Detachable Drive: No

BSD Name: disk0

Protocol: ATA

Unit Number: 0

Socket Type: Internal

OS9 Drivers: Yes

S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported

Volumes:

PhSh_Scratch_2:

Capacity: 149.05 GB

Available: 148.99 GB

Writable: Yes

File System: HFS+

BSD Name: disk0s9

Mount Point: /Volumes/PhSh_Scratch_2

ST3160023A:

Capacity: 149.05 GB

Model: ST3160023A

Revision: 3.06

Serial Number: 3JS213MB

Removable Media: No

Detachable Drive: No

BSD Name: disk3

Protocol: ATA

Unit Number: 1

Socket Type: Internal

OS9 Drivers: Yes

S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported

Volumes:

PhSh_Scratch_3:

Capacity: 49.88 GB

Available: 49.84 GB

Writable: Yes

File System: HFS+

BSD Name: disk3s10

Mount Point: /Volumes/PhSh_Scratch_3

Flex_1_Tiger:

Capacity: 9.88 GB

Available: 4.16 GB

Writable: Yes

File System: Journaled HFS+

BSD Name: disk3s12

Mount Point: /Volumes/Flex_1_Tiger

MacOS_9_straight:

Capacity: 19.88 GB

Available: 14.32 GB

Writable: Yes

File System: Journaled HFS+

BSD Name: disk3s14

Mount Point: /Volumes/MacOS_9_straight

Panther_w_bkp_old:

Capacity: 68.92 GB

Available: 36.03 GB

Writable: Yes

File System: Journaled HFS+

BSD Name: disk3s16

Mount Point: /Volumes/Panther_w_bkp_old

I know it's not that much of a job, but as clumsy as I am with manual labor, I'd rather just do it once. 😉

Thanks in advance.

PowerMac, Mac OS X (10.4.11), 2.5G5Quad,16GB,7800GTX 512MB, Tiger

Posted on Jun 8, 2012 8:39 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

BDAqua

Level 10

239,213 points

Jun 8, 2012 9:06 PM in response to Ramón G Castañeda

There is a way... but I forget how... maybe it was in Disk Utility?

You could just pull the IDE cable from one at a time without removing them to see which is missing, especially if you can Boot from FW! 🙂

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Answer 2

Jun 8, 2012 9:14 PM in response to BDAqua

BDAqua wrote:

…You could just pull the IDE cable from one at a time without removing them to see which is missing, especially if you can Boot from FW! 🙂

Doh! Of course! Oh, do I feel silly now. 😝

Thanks a bunch, BDAqua. 🙂

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Answer 3

BDAqua

Level 10

239,213 points

Jun 8, 2012 9:19 PM in response to Ramón G Castañeda

Great news, & thanks again! 🙂

We should get together sometime when we're both feeling silly! 😉😝

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Answer 4

pincrete

Level 1

4 points

Jun 9, 2012 12:12 AM in response to Ramón G Castañeda

Drive Set up will tell you which bus each disk is on (and whether it is Master - 0, or slave -1).

I can't remember what the bus no's are ..... I THINK that the lowest number is the back (upright) bus, next the optical bus, last is the bottom bus .... I THINK.

By the way pulling out the leads one at a time will probably cause a freeze or crash, especially of course if you pull out the active system.

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Answer 5

BDAqua

Level 10

239,213 points

Jun 9, 2012 12:53 AM in response to pincrete

Tanks for the input, much appreciated! 🙂

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Answer 6

Jun 9, 2012 1:12 AM in response to pincrete

pincrete wrote:

…pulling out the leads one at a time will probably cause a freeze or crash, especially of course if you pull out the active system…

LOL ! 😁 Give me some credit, dude! I've been using Macs since the Mac Plus in the mid 1980s and computers since the early 1960s (Siemens and IBM behemoths). That's pretty much half a century. I'm not that clueless. 😀

Thank you for the courtesy of your reply, though. Much appreciated, even if it made me laugh. 🙂

Here's my update:

Don't worry. I powered the machine entirely off, pulled the power cable from the back of the machine, and then humbly followed BDAqua's advice. I disconnected the ribbon cable on the rear bay first, and lo and behold, when I booted the machine back up again that one turned out to be the one with the two drives I wanted. I pulled them out, replaced the rear-bay sled back into the G4 and powered it back on to test it. The computer still works flawlessly with the remaining two internal 160 GB hard drives.

I put the 160 GB drive in a FireWire enclosure and it's already functioning as the dedicated primary scratch disk drive for Photoshop 13 ("CS6") on the MacBook. Made a HUGE difference in the performance of Photoshop on my limited MacBook (not Pro).

The other enclosure turned out to be USB2 only (no FireWire 😟), but I put the 400 Gb hard drive there and it works just fine too. I'll get a simple USB2 hub and use it as Time Machine disk on the same MacBook. For the time being, I'm testing it attached to my G5 Quad, because I ran out of USB ports, as one is feeding a secondary external monitor through a USB adapter/video card, and the other one is used by the keyboard/mouse combo. Everything checks out OK. The primary external monitor is being driven by the MacBook's own built-in monitor port.

I doubt there are many users out there running Photoshop 13 on a plain MacBook that's also driving two 22" CRT monitors. 😎

My thanks again to BDAqua.

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Answer 7

pincrete

Level 1

4 points

Jun 9, 2012 2:41 AM in response to Ramón G Castañeda

Apologies for stating the obvious !

I can (slightly) better you, I had a 512k Mac with external 400k disc drive (bought for 5 pounds in a charity (thrift) shop in UK), it also came with the original sales leaflets (advertising an optional 1MB external HDD drive for ONLY about 2000 Pounds extra!). It - just about - ran MS Word 3.0 at a snail's pace but didn't do anything useful for long so I soon jumped to an SE30.

Foolishly I threw much of this away in the early 90's and gutted the 512k Mac (keeping only the outer case which now sits as a 'chemicals cupboard' in my garden shed !.

Since (for other reasons) I've been switching drives on my MDD recently, I can say that actually I did succeed in live unplugging, as long as I dismounted the drive first, and did succeed in live re-plugging using Drive Set-up to remount, all this was being done in OS 9.2 though.

Glad it's all working and again apologies for treating you as a dummo .... I'm at present a dummo when it comes to OSX and I notice people asking the stangest questions on various sites.

Paul

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