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PowerMac G4 - Won't boot with 2 HDDs

olliea95

olliea95

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 10, 2009
102
0
Surrey, UK
Hello,

I have been just added a second HD to my machine and tried to boot up, but it fails.

All I have done is add another hard drive, not touched the existing one, and it only gets to the apple logo, but then I don't get a little loading indicator.

I have tried booting up holding option, then selecting my HDD, yet this seems to take forever, and I just gave up and did power off by holding the power button.

When I take out the secondary hard drive, so that only the primary is in, then it boots fine and works as usual.

I have also booted up using the OS X install DVD and formatted the secondary HDD.

I can remember doing this and it working fine before.

Does anyone have any ideas? as I would love to have another, for backup purposes.

My specs are: PowerMac G4 400mhz - 512 mb RAM - 128 gb (primary) - 20 gb (secondary, the one I am trying to get to work)

Thanks!!

-Ollie

EDIT: I am using OS X 10.4.11
 
OrangeSVTguy

OrangeSVTguy

macrumors 601
Sep 16, 2007
4,127
69
Northeastern Ohio
Since you more then likely have them on the same bus, you will need to look where the cables are inserted into the hard drive and you will see a little jumper, look on the hard drive and set your boot to "master" and the other hard drive to "slave".
 
olliea95

olliea95

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 10, 2009
102
0
Surrey, UK
I'm sorry I have no idea what I am looking for. What does this 'jumper' look like? Is it on the HD or the cable?

Thanks for reply
 
drewsof07

drewsof07

macrumors 68020
Oct 30, 2006
2,016
428
Ohio
^^
I have my primary set to "Master" and the second to "Cable Select"
With this I boot Tiger on the primary and Leopard on the second. It took me several tries to get it right. I tried setting the secondary to "Slave" and saw it on the desktop, but was unable to boot from it.

Also, make sure you look to see which side the single pin is on when switching the jumper. My pin config was upside down on one drive than on the other.

Your jumper is a set of 4-5 pairs of pins that have a jumper (plastic piece that connects a pair of pins) On the label of your hard drive, it will tell you where to place this jumper in order to allow your hard drive to be used in different ways.

Note* the configuration below is just an example and varies from different manufacturers. (this is from seagate)

harddrive-C.jpg
useries6family.gif
 
olliea95

olliea95

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 10, 2009
102
0
Surrey, UK
Great thanks drewsof07!!

Managed to set primary as master, yet my secondary did not have a little plastic bit, neither the diagram.

But just setting primary to master fixed my whole ordeal.

Thanks both!
 
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