Hi, never used support before - here goes! My Mac G4 MDD no longer shows the start up hard drive icon. The one with all my files on! It shows the other 3 hard drive icons and boots up OK. Has my start up hard drive failed? Can it be fixed? Thanks.

Question

Green Oz Author

Level 1

0 points

Hi, never used support before - here goes! My Mac G4 MDD no longer shows the start up hard drive icon. The one with all my files on! It shows the other 3 hard drive icons and boots up OK. Has my start up hard drive failed? Can it be fixed? Thanks.

Hi, never used support before - here goes!

My Mac G4 MDD no longer shows the start up hard drive icon. The one with all my files on!

It shows the other 3 hard drive icons and boots up OK.

Has my start up hard drive failed? Can it be fixed?

Thanks.

Machine Name: Power Mac G4

Machine Model: PowerMac3,6

CPU Type: PowerPC G4 (3.2)

Number Of CPUs: 2

CPU Speed: 1.25 GHz

L2 Cache (per CPU): 256 KB

L3 Cache (per CPU): 1 MB

Memory: 2 GB

Bus Speed: 167 MHz

Boot ROM Version: 4.5.7f1

Mac G4 MDD-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.4.11), 1.25 Ghz

Posted on Mar 3, 2015 12:35 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 6, 2015 7:52 AM in response to Green Oz

It sounds like you have multiple partitions on your hard disk. Do you have multiple boot partitions too?

I'm confused as to how you can boot the machine if your startup (system) drive has failed.

How many volumes did you have before? Have you looked at the disk in Disk Utility to see what that shows?

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Answer 2

Camelot

Level 9

54,339 points

Mar 6, 2015 10:06 PM in response to Green Oz

Doesn't sound like any hard drive failure to me - more a Finder preference.

Finder -> Preferences -> General -> Show these items on the desktop -> Hard disks

The startup disk is sometimes treated differently from other disks (such as external and network disks) and I'm guessing this is a simple preference setting, although I might be wrong.

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