my mother has a 2009 Mac Pro OS X 10.10.5
Last week the HD packed up and she restored from backup to a 2nd drive she has in the machine.
She purchased a HGSt 4tb internal drive to replace the broken one.
I have put the new drive in all the 4 bays but it does not show up in disk utility so it can be formatted.
Any help or ideas as to how I can get this drive working for her.
Thanks
Mac Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)
Hmmmm,!?
If it's for sure SATA 3 Gb/s compatible, I'd say there's a fair chance it's DOA or Your SATA Bus is flaky.
Are you fairly certain the old drive died, or could it be a problem in the Mac Pro?
Thanks for your reply
The drive is quoted as SATA 6Gb/s 7200rpm.
Re the old drive:
Apparently it would not boot up although initially the Win7 partition worked. After a while the Win7 drive wasn't showing up when booting with Alt key.
The backup drive which is an external USB drive is ok.
I have since tried another old drive of mine in all the trays and it is visible in disk utility.
Is there anyway of checking if the new drive is actually DOA.
thanks
Drives over about 3TB are problematic, but not for advanced technical reasons. It's due to really simple stuff. The screws.
There is not enough room for full-length screws on certain drives that contain an extra platter. Some manufacturers have reduced the allowable penetration depth of the screws into the drive where they are adjacent to the platters. You must be extremely careful when mounting these drives to the sled. Each and every screw must be tightened so that the gasket under the screw is 'just snug'.
If the screw hole has been shortened, the screw will appear tight before the gasket has been compressed. Then the drive will not hang straight from the sled, but will be cocked. When you go to insert it into the bay, the connector will not mate, and the drive will not be visible in Disk Utility.
Solutions include shortening the screws, or putting a washer under the screw head.
Impressive knowledge, thanks! 🙂
What sled/mount screws/mounting holes are you using? are you using?
With the higher capacity disks like you have the screws you use have to be shortened or use a newer sled that use the alternate mounting holes on the disk.
If the screes are too long they bottom out i the drive and protrude from the sled prevent good contacts between the disk and the backplane connector.
Try using the drive with a dock or similar external USB enclosure.
Also you will have trouble formatting the drive with 10.8.4 and later
That bug appeared in 10.8.4, and has not yet been fixed.
using a Disk Utility from any older Mac OS X, including the 10.6 DVD (if your Mac can boot from it) or any saved Installer DVD or thumb drive will work.
Another work-around is to move that drive to an external enclosure and Erase it there (provided your enclosure is modern enough to deal with drives over 2.2TB.
You are right about the screws. The drive came with 4 "short" screws
I removed the screws from the "deceased" drive as these had the soft mounting washers and used them.
Put the drive in and it worked - it has now been formatted and ready to use.
thanks for that very important tip
You also picked up the problem with screws - which I have now rectified.
The new drive has been formatted and I am trying a clean install of El Capitan although I now realise that the
drive my mother restored has Yosemite 10.10.5. I assume if she restores to the new drive El capitan will be written over.
You can restore everything (which is really easy) and the old Mac OS X will be installed as well. You can restore just Applications. You can restore just User files.
Do not be concerned about overall system Preferences, there almost none of those, and they will be recreated as needed without causing trouble. The bulk of preferences are stored and restored with users data.
To restore everything:
Pondini's Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions: 14. How do I restore my entire system?
To selectively restore, you can restore just specific items or the entire /Users sub-directory, but you need Mac OS X running to do this:
Pondini's Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions:15. How do I view or restore selected items?
.
Thanks for that info - it worked for the part restore as we wanted.
Thanks
new internal 4tb drive not showing up in disk utility
