Help for a hard drive dummy

I returned the 250GB HD in favor of a 120GB. Installed it acc. to instructions. Tried making the original 40 GB HD the master and the new 120GB HD the slave - no joy. Tried swapping the arrangement - Disk Utility sees the new drive but not the old one. Got the new one up and running, but when the old one is connected to the cable the new one will not act as the startup disk. I finally disconnected the old one and am in the process of rebuilding everything I had on it onto the new one.

Still do not understand what happened. Disk Utility never saw the old HD after I tried to install the first new one. Still doesn't.

Power supply burned out about 6 months ago - replaced with a new one. no issues.

Would still like to get some of the data off the old HD - any other ideas?

You'd have to verify that the drive is spinning. I usually connect the power but not the IDE, boot and check.

If it's not turning, your options are pretty slim - drive recovery service. I can tell you from experience that a typical recovery STARTS at $1400 and goes rapidly up. This is where backups are your savior..

If it IS spinning, you might be able to boot from an Install disc and use Disk Utility on it, or get DiskWarrior or TechTool and use them to try recovering the directories on the drive.

-Douggo

Douggo,

Some advice you gave a user called "hard disk dummy", below suggested using cable select on both drives works. The seagate installation instructions for installing a new internal hard drive say "dont' use cable select mode." Can I use cable select mode or not? I will have all seagate Ultra ATA 100 drives when I have finished upgrading.

Thanks for your time,

L. Jones

Re-check your jumper settings when you install the

new drive. Your options are to either set both drives
to Cable Select, or configure them as Master and
Slave.

By and large, MDD's work fine with Cable Select. I find it odd that Seagate would manufacture a drive with CS jumper pins and then tell you not to use them...

That said, try setting them to Master and Slave respectively (if they are on the same bus) with the Master on the black connector end of the ribbon cable. It should work just as well configured that way.

-Douggo

I have questions, that seem like they were close to what has been discussed here. I have a 1.25GHz G4 PowerMac w/ 2GB RAM that has been used hard, everyday since I bought it new in 2003. It has the original HD, plus I have added a 200GB and most recently a 300GB to replace one that went bad. But it is moving so slow! It takes almost a minute to save changes to pictures in iPhoto. It seems to work ok, once things are running, but as soon as I save or access the HD it really slows down. My activity monitor reports only 1-3MB/sec.

The jumpers are set to cable select as per the instructions. I saw in this thread the letters IDE in front of ATA. Not sure what that means, but my box does not have the IDE. It says only 7200RPM, ATA/100, 16MB cache, by Maxtor. Could that be part of the problem. Or maybe my problem started before the last hard drive failure, and all this behavior is just a symptom of something else.

To trouble shoot, I have tried moving my iPhoto library to all three drives on my computer, and it is just as slow and annoying on all drives.

I would be most grateful for help!

IDE and ATA are different acronyms for the same thing - a device bus for optical and hard drives. The MDD's have three separate ATA buses: ATA-100 and ATA-66 for the two hard drive bays, and ATA-33 for the optical drives. Each bus has its own controller.

It would be very strange to experience read/write slowdowns on either hard drive bus unless the drives are extremely full and the files badly fragmented. It may be related to a jumper issue with the additional drives. You could test this by switching the jumpers on them to Master and Slave settings relative to the bus they are on.

You might also try booting in Safe Mode (Shift key held through bootup) and see if there's a process loading that's causing the performance hit.

-Douggo

I'm writing in response to a prior question about upgrading a hard drive.

How do I know the maximum size my computer will handle?

I have a Power Mac G4 with a 1 GHz speed and 1 Gig of RAM.

Also, a PowerBook G4, with 550 GHz speed, and 512 MB RAM.

Is this information listed somewhere?

Thanks for any help.

Peter

Mac G4 ("Quicksilver"?) Mac OS X (10.4.10) 1 GHz, 1Gig RAM,

Thanks, appreciate your time. I also wondered about the Seagate note to not use cable select (obviously). I have since bought 2 new drives and put one on each bus with cable select. All is well.

If your system hard drive (original) is very very full, it will slow Your system down. You may want to replace your system (boot drive) with a larger drive as well.

Is the absolute ceiling for my machine 120 GB? In one of my PCI slots (according to the Profiler) is a card called "pci3083,30". Does this let me go above 120 GB? Is there some sort of card I can add that will let me use a 200 GB drive?

I have a G4 Mac. How do I tell if I have ATA-100 or ATA-66 for the purposes of replacing my current hard drive?

Hi

Most if not all ATA-100 drives are backwards compatible with ATA-66, so I'd just go for an ATA-100. I expect you'd find it almost impossible to buy an ATA-66 drive these days anyway.

To answer the question though, ATA-100 was introduced in the G4 towers with a mirrored front, the MDDs and FW800 models. These have an ATA-100 controller for the rear drive bay and an ATA-66 controller for the front drive bay (beneath the optical drives). All other G4 towers use an ATA-66 controller, the one exception being the very first PCI graphics/Yikes! model, which effectively uses the same logic board as the B&W G3 with ATA-33.

The following articles should help you determine which G4 model you have:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58418
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=42739

In practice though, any ATA-100 (or ATA-133) drive should work.

You should be able to put in a larger drive and partition it into sections below 120 gigs.