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installing a second Hd on my PowerMacG4

N

Noeland

macrumors newbie
Original poster
WELL, I installed a Maxtor 250Gb ata HD on my Powermac last night. The system is a duel 1.4 that came with a 150GB HD installed, that I have quickly been filling up with video editing projects.

Anyway, the drive shows up fine in the disc utility, but I can't get it initialized, or get an icon to show up on the desk top for the darn thing, so I can start bringing over the files.

What am I doing wrong here, why can't I get an icon to show up for it? Is there a trick to initializing the HD that I am missing?

Thanks in advance gurus. 🙂

Noeland-----------------------------------------
 
My understanding is that I have not. That initializing, and formatting are the same thing. I can't seem to make that happen. How about some advice 🙂

Njc--------------------
 
Did you set the jumpers correctly?

If there is a conflict the drive may not show up.

But also look at System Profiler to see if the OS is seeing it.
 
It should be set to Cable Select. Then you should be able to open Disk Utility, select the drive on the left, go to the Partition tab, then click the Partition button. It'll automatically format and mount the drive when you partition it.
 
I set it to cable select, and it wouldn't see the HD, once it was set to slave, the disk utilty can see it, but I don't seem to be able to partition, or format the drive through disk utility. I will try again.

Thanks for the advice guys.

Noeland----------------------------------
 
It did show up in Disk Utility? Right?

1. Open up Disk Utility
2. Select the new hard drive on the left.
3. Select 'Erase' from the tab on the right.
4. I assume you want to format it with Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
5. Name the hard drive.
6. Click the 'Erase' bottom right .
7. Give it a minute and it should appear on your desktop.
8. If it doesn't click 'mount' at the very top.
 
You may want an ATA/133 card

Depending on your drive's max speed and the age of your G4, you may find that the second drive is stuck running at ATA/33, when it could be running at ATA/133. If so, you'd be well served by buying a PCI ATA/133 controller (I just bought one from Sonnet for an old G4, and it made a huge difference).

YMMV.
 
mstecker said:
Depending on your drive's max speed and the age of your G4, you may find that the second drive is stuck running at ATA/33, when it could be running at ATA/133. If so, you'd be well served by buying a PCI ATA/133 controller (I just bought one from Sonnet for an old G4, and it made a huge difference).

YMMV.
Click to expand...


If you have an original Dual 1.42 then you have ata100 onboard, so don't worry! Older G4s have ata66. (only the PCI Grapics G4 has ata33).
 
It's the newer kind, and it came with a 150GB HD, so it already has the proper setup for the larger HD's. In fact, I bought this shortly before G5's came out. I had no idea they were coming out, or I'd of waited another month.

Anyway, what's happening is, it shows up fine in disc utility, although it's reporting the available space way below 250GB, it says 233GB. Same with the other HD, it's reporting the size at 119GB. Why is this?

Well, when I attempt to "erase" or "partition" or "mount" I get a blue bar that moves fast, then sticks in place for hours, and hours. I left it over night, and this morning, the bar had not moved past 3/4 of the way, which is where it was when I went to sleep.

I don't get it. I must be missing something small.

The jumpers ARE set correctly. I've installed HD's before (not in this machine though) and have never had a problem with doing it like this one. Is it the OS maybe??

Noeland-----------------------------------
 
Noeland said:
It's the newer kind, and it came with a 150GB HD, so it already has the proper setup for the larger HD's. In fact, I bought this shortly before G5's came out. I had no idea they were coming out, or I'd of waited another month.

Anyway, what's happening is, it shows up fine in disc utility, although it's reporting the available space way below 250GB, it says 233GB. Same with the other HD, it's reporting the size at 119GB. Why is this?

Well, when I attempt to "erase" or "partition" or "mount" I get a blue bar that moves fast, then sticks in place for hours, and hours. I left it over night, and this morning, the bar had not moved past 3/4 of the way, which is where it was when I went to sleep.

I don't get it. I must be missing something small.

The jumpers ARE set correctly. I've installed HD's before (not in this machine though) and have never had a problem with doing it like this one. Is it the OS maybe??

Noeland-----------------------------------
Click to expand...

Drive could be DOA, try another drive and/or cable.

As for the "misreporting," This is true of any mass storage device as a result of drive makers being allowed to market 1MB = 1,000,000 bytes and 1GB = 1000MB = 1,000,000,000 which is not accurate (1MB really equals 1,048,576 bytes and 1GB = 1,073,741,824) - a loss of 70.32 MB per GB advertised.

MANY MANY MANY other threads on this topic, so you have nothing to worry about there.
 
Do you have another computer you can try the drive in? Even if it is a PC, just make to make sure the drive works.
 
grapes911 said:
Do you have another computer you can try the drive in? Even if it is a PC, just make to make sure the drive works.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I do, but I'm just going to bring the drive back and get an external drive, I don't want to mess with it any longer.

I thank everyone for their advice and time.

Noeland
 
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