Okay, so we have this old Sawtooth around that's been upgraded and upgraded, turning it into a Frankensteinien monster so that we wouldn't have to just buy a new machine. It's one of the originals, first crop that came out, and nothing on it has absolutely needed to be replaced until just now.
Yesterday, the Quantum HD that came with the machine finally died of bad bearings after about six years of hard use. We'd already known the drive would fail eventually, and had installed a Soltek PCI card to act as an SATA controller for the Seagate drive we put in. When the drive died, I dutifully cracked the case and checked all connection to be certain it wasn't that kind of error, and the pulled the IDE and molex from the drive. Oddly, the machine always looks on the IDE channel for the boot drive and refues to do anything else without outside prompting.
It can boot from CD, as I discovered, and will boot from an external FireWire drive I'm temporarily in possession of. What it refuses to do, even if you hold down the option key at bootup and select the SATA drive (which it apparently knows is there), is to boot from said drive. I'm guessing it has something to do with the OpenFirmware boot cycle, but I was hoping someone out there would know a trick to get it to look there first. Also, DiskWarrior has been used to make sure that both of the volumes on the drive are working and well tuned.
The system is:
Apple PowerMac G4 "Sawtooth" motherboard
GigaDesigns 1.4ghz G4 upgrade at stock rating
1.25GB PC133 RAM
Seagate 120GB SATA through Soltek PCI adapter
Apple combo drive (OEM)
Asante PCI NIC
nVidia GeForce 3
Mac OS X 10.3.5, all current patches
homebrew FireWire drive in generic enclosure
Yesterday, the Quantum HD that came with the machine finally died of bad bearings after about six years of hard use. We'd already known the drive would fail eventually, and had installed a Soltek PCI card to act as an SATA controller for the Seagate drive we put in. When the drive died, I dutifully cracked the case and checked all connection to be certain it wasn't that kind of error, and the pulled the IDE and molex from the drive. Oddly, the machine always looks on the IDE channel for the boot drive and refues to do anything else without outside prompting.
It can boot from CD, as I discovered, and will boot from an external FireWire drive I'm temporarily in possession of. What it refuses to do, even if you hold down the option key at bootup and select the SATA drive (which it apparently knows is there), is to boot from said drive. I'm guessing it has something to do with the OpenFirmware boot cycle, but I was hoping someone out there would know a trick to get it to look there first. Also, DiskWarrior has been used to make sure that both of the volumes on the drive are working and well tuned.
The system is:
Apple PowerMac G4 "Sawtooth" motherboard
GigaDesigns 1.4ghz G4 upgrade at stock rating
1.25GB PC133 RAM
Seagate 120GB SATA through Soltek PCI adapter
Apple combo drive (OEM)
Asante PCI NIC
nVidia GeForce 3
Mac OS X 10.3.5, all current patches
homebrew FireWire drive in generic enclosure
