wierd hdd noises??

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I'd run disk utility on the drive first to see if it needs repair. It is usually pretty good about telling you of the drive is about to kick the bucket. If it says that there are major issues with the drive and it cannot be repaired then make sure you have a good backup and replace the drive. If everything with the drive appears to be fine then I would crack it open and try cleaning the fans with some compressed air.

cave12man said:

I have a PowerMac G4 with mirrored drive doors and just realized that my HDD (i think) is making these wierd scratchy squeaking noises. it might be my fan making them but im not 100% sure. anyone have these problems? im hoping that this doesnt mean the HDD is about to kick the bucket. should i get a new HDD and ditch the old one? How would i go about swapping hard drives? I know there are issues with getting the new one to boot the comp n such. Any help would be great.

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Yeah I would say that your hard drive is about to kick the bucket. Here is what I would do. I would turn off that Power Mac and not use it till you get another hard drive.

Now the nice think is that your Power Mac G4 being a MDD G4, you do not have the 128Gb limitation, so I would recommend going to Newegg.com and getting yourself a nice be hard drive for not that much. I would recommend this model:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822210019

Your MDD had a 133 Mhz bus so this drive get you the best results in speed that your system has to offer and the price is really good.

Once you have your new drive you will need to install it. It is really not that difficult and here is a video on how to do it from macsales.com:
http://eshop.macsales.com/tech_center/index.cfm?page=Video/harddrive/g4mddata133/med.html

Now once you have the drive installed, your Mac will either recognize it and it will be on the desktop OR it will tell you that you need to initialize the drive.

EITHER WAY, what I like to do is go to Application --> Utilities --> Disk Utility.app and the format hard drive with the default format without the Mac OS 9 drivers.

Once you have done that I would use SuperDuper! to clone your hard drive> Here is the link:
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Its a free program that I have used before and it works great. Once you have cloned your drive, boot to your new drive which you can do in System Preferences with Startup Disk.

Make sure that everything works correctly, everything should look exactly the same as your old hard drive except now you should have alot more space available to you.

Once you have confirmed that the new hard drive is working correctly, I would take the old drive out, put it somewhere save incase you need to get information off of it in the future.

Hope this helps!!!
-Grant

cave12man said:

awesome info bud. exactly what i needed. i had a small understanding of how to do it but wasnt all that sure so this REALLY helped. many many thanks and ill probably do this tonight.

cheers and thanks again

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Hahahah no problem, I remember the first time I had the same thing happen to me, it took me 2 days to figure out how to do everything correctly. If you run into problems or need more help just ask!!!

-iGrant

cave12man said:

Grant-

Was about to order the hard drive you mentioned and got to wondering, if i bought 2 of them could i install the second one as a second hard drive after i copy/back-up/replace my old one with the first? Im guessing i would backup/copy/replace the defunct one i have now with the first one i buy and then after removing the one that is bad i could install the second new one? Is installing a second hard drive easy? Not sure if you have ever done it but you seem to know your **** and ive never really done much of this before. Thanks for the help and apologies if i am being hard to understand, i wasnt sure how to word it all.

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Actually yes that will work and to let you know your G4 MDD Power Mac can hold 4 hard drives, you have two buses though, two are 100Mhz and two are 66Mhz.

Technically you can put 4 of those drivse in there and get 1Terabyte of storage.

Let me know if you need anything else.

-iGrant

cave12man said:

hey grant was about to do dive into this whole hard drive swapping business and after watching the video you gave me i have one question that you may be able to help me with.

in the video it says to set the new drive as a slave by moving the jumper to the right spot, but how does the comp know to boot off the second one after you clone it and remove the first? would you move the jumper back to be set as the master or not even move the jumper to slave in the first place and leave the startup disk to do that?

sorry if that doesnt make sense, im just trying to get a handle on all thsi before i go f-in something up. tnx again.

chris

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Chris,

You are correct in what you are asking and it makes perfect sense.

The Mac OS will be able to boot to a slave drive, you just need to select it in System Preferences -> Startup Disk!

I would however after you take the old drive out, make your new drive the "Master"! That way if the pram gets cleared it will just automatically boot to that drive.

Let me know if you need anything else!

Grant

nice information you got there my friend is asking me about this too. am not to experienced when it comes to mac..so thanks for this

it doesnt matter that the drive on newegg is a 133 bus speed and the mdd is a 100 bus speed?

im looking to upgrade the HDD in my G4 Quicksilver dual 1ghz (either 500gb or 1tb for torrentz box and internet tv etc)

wondering if i can use 133 ata ide harddrives (mine has no storage max)

Kris