Help with installing tiger on AGP Power Mac G4?

TotalNewbie · Aug 8, 2012

Hi,

As my anem suggests I am an absolute n00b and basicly what happened if I brought a Power Mac G4 at an auction for a bargain price of £8.50

and as it didn't come with a hdd I brought and installed one. I'm now trying to install Tiger 10.4 but evertime I get to select an install disc no ahrdrive shows up even though I've got two installed. I think it's because I need to format them both but when I try to bring up disk utility I get the spinning beach ball of death

.

Is there any way of formating a harddrive for a mac in windows? Or do I have to make a linux live disk or something?

Any help or insight would be appreciated. Although I'm no expert with mac I like to think fo myself as pretty good with PC's.

Regards,

Zeke D · Aug 8, 2012

the disk needs to have APM (apple partition map) if your drive is MBR (windows) it wont install to it. when you are booting the tiger install disc use disk manager from the utilities menu to repartition it apm.

eyoungren · Aug 8, 2012

Zeke D said:
the disk needs to have APM (apple partition map) if your drive is MBR (windows) it wont install to it. when you are booting the tiger install disc use disk manager from the utilities menu to repartition it apm.

The way I'm reading the OP's post, he's getting SBBOD when he accesses Disk Utility after booting from the Tiger disk. Which means he can't partition or format the drive.

Unfortunately, I don't know anything that would help.

Intell · Aug 8, 2012

Try it with just one hard drive in the machine. You may have their master/slave jumpers set incorrectly.

TotalNewbie · Aug 8, 2012

Intell said:
Try it with just one hard drive in the machine. You may have their master/slave jumpers set incorrectly.

Good idea, I'll tryin the morning and post back.

Regards,

TotalNewbie · Aug 9, 2012

Tried it this morning and still no luck,

Any other ideas guys? Thanks for all the help so far.

Regards,

BrianBaughn · Aug 9, 2012

Could be a problem with the install disc. Is it dirty or scratched?

Also, what model is it exactly?

TotalNewbie · Aug 9, 2012

The install disc isn't scratched and is in perfect condition, as for the model I don't know exactly as it doesn't have an OS on it but I've opened it up and it has agp graphics with DVI output which according to this [http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3082] article means it's a Power Mac g4 with agp graphics. If you have any more questions please don't hesitate to ask.

Do you think using a panther install disk would help?

Regards,

alexreich · Aug 9, 2012

You could burn yourself a PowerPC Linux distro and try booting it up. If you can see the hard drive in Linux, it may be the formatting/partition scheme of your hard disk that is causing you issues in OS X. If you can see your hard disk with a Linux distro, just format the disk as necessary and then try OS X again.

May or may not help, but it's worth a shot if you've currently got a useless pile of rubbish at this point...

TotalNewbie · Aug 9, 2012

I'm downloading ubuntu and I'me going to burn it onto a disc as soon as I can, I'll report back in a jiffy.

Regards,

TotalNewbie · Aug 9, 2012

I boot into the power PC version of ubuntu 10.10 but my monitor says input not supported, so I'm back to square one I'm re-downloading Tiger from another source and I'm going to burn it again using power ISO set to 4x burn speed.

Regards,

Zeke D · Aug 9, 2012

TotalNewbie said:
Tried it this morning and still no luck, Any other ideas guys? Thanks for all the help so far.

Regards,

Make sure the hard drive is set to cable select or CS. I assume you do not have any other macs to hook it up to for formatting. Perhaps a colleague would be able to format it for you. You can also try moving drives around on different IDE channels. Replacing the IDE cables would also be a good troubleshooting step.

TotalNewbie · Aug 9, 2012

Good news!

Or atleast I think, I've manage to reburn tiger to a disk and now when I insert it into my mac I can access the disk utility although I now have another problem. When I go into disk utility instead of listing the 2 disks I have installed (one original and one extra 60gb ide) it only lists the dvd drive a 4.8gb MATSHITADVD. I definitley have two working hard drives installed and I have tried booting with only one install but it still doesn't list the disks. Please help and any help or insight will be met with huge amounts of gratitude.

Regards,

BrianBaughn · Aug 9, 2012

What happens if you slave one of the HDs on the DVD drive cable? That's not a solution, but if Disk Utility sees it there may be a problem with the other cable or the motherboard.

TotalNewbie · Aug 10, 2012

I'm going to try testing the hard drives in my PC to see if they work.

Regards,

LeoTheLion89 · Aug 10, 2012

TotalNewbie said:
Hi,

As my anem suggests I am an absolute n00b and basicly what happened if I brought a Power Mac G4 at an auction for a bargain price of £8.50 and as it didn't come with a hdd I brought and installed one. I'm now trying to install Tiger 10.4 but evertime I get to select an install disc no ahrdrive shows up even though I've got two installed. I think it's because I need to format them both but when I try to bring up disk utility I get the spinning beach ball of death .

Is there any way of formating a harddrive for a mac in windows? Or do I have to make a linux live disk or something? Any help or insight would be appreciated. Although I'm no expert with mac I like to think fo myself as pretty good with PC's.

Regards,

once the system boots the Install DVD click on Utilities --> Disk Utility u need to format the HDD as a Apple Partition Map some G4s cant take HDDs bigger than 128GB in size (although only 1 G4 (nicknamed "Yikes!" G4) cant take HDDs bigger than 128GB.

----------

TotalNewbie said:
I boot into the power PC version of ubuntu 10.10 but my monitor says input not supported, so I'm back to square one I'm re-downloading Tiger from another source and I'm going to burn it again using power ISO set to 4x burn speed.

Regards,

do not use a Ubuntu distro newer than 10.04 on a G4 if its under 1GHz use Ubuntu 8.04

----------

BrianBaughn said:
What happens if you slave one of the HDs on the DVD drive cable? That's not a solution, but if Disk Utility sees it there may be a problem with the other cable or the motherboard.

ive never had a problem slaving a HDD to the DVD Drive in a PC spite being told to never do that.

BrianBaughn · Aug 10, 2012

LeoTheLion89 said:
ive never had a problem slaving a HDD to the DVD Drive in a PC spite being told to never do that.

I think on all those AGP Macs the IDE for the DVD drive is half as fast as the one meant for the HDs. I had an old Sawtooth set up with a third drive there, also.

LeoTheLion89 · Aug 10, 2012

BrianBaughn said:
I think on all those AGP Macs the IDE for the DVD drive is half as fast as the one meant for the HDs. I had an old Sawtooth set up with a third drive there, also.

well i have been told slaving a HDD to the CD/DVD drive will decrease preformance however i have never seen any difference

on that same note i also havent seen any preformance difference between a SATA and an IDE HDD

Intell · Aug 10, 2012

BrianBaughn said:
I think on all those AGP Macs the IDE for the DVD drive is half as fast as the one meant for the HDs. I had an old Sawtooth set up with a third drive there, also.

This is correct. The optical bus or the 2nd IDE channel in was ATA-3 with a maximum speed of about 16.6Mbps. While the hard drive bue or the 1st IDE channel was always at least ATA-5 with a maximum speed of 66Mbps. This applies to every G4 from the Sawtooth onward.

LeoTheLion89 said:
well i have been told slaving a HDD to the CD/DVD drive will decrease preformance however i have never seen any difference

on that same note i also havent seen any preformance difference between a SATA and an IDE HDD

If you haven't seen the speed difference of the primary and secondary IDE buses on a G4 PowerMac, you must be using some very poor performance drives.

If you haven't seen any difference between a PATA/IDE drive and a SATA drive, you must be using a very slow, cheap SATA drive.

LeoTheLion89 · Aug 10, 2012

Intell said:
If you haven't seen the speed difference of the primary and secondary IDE buses on a G4 PowerMac, you must be using some very poor performance drives.

I was refering to a PC not a G4

Intell said:
If you haven't seen any difference between a PATA/IDE drive and a SATA drive, you must be using a very slow, cheap SATA drive.

i use a SATA II 7200PRM WD 500GB HDD runing windows 7 in my AMD machine i have also ran windows 7 on a IDE 7200PRM HDD (to check compatibility and see if my windows 7 activator program worked) saw no better preformance between the IDE and SATA both running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit.

Intell · Aug 10, 2012

LeoTheLion89 said:
I was refering to a PC not a G4

i use a SATA II 7200PRM WD 500GB HDD runing windows 7 in my AMD machine i have also ran windows 7 on a IDE 7200PRM HDD (to check compatibility and see if my windows 7 activator program worked) saw no better preformance between the IDE and SATA both running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit.

G4's are not the same internally as PC's when it comes to logicboard design.

If you saw no change, the SATA drive was likely in PATA mode rather than ACHI/native mode for it to work at its true speed and correct minimal latency. The simple difference of the two modes alone is very noticeable.

PS: Lose the red centred comic sans.

LeoTheLion89 · Aug 10, 2012

Intell said:
G4's are not the same internally as PC's when it comes to logicboard design.

If you saw no change, the SATA drive was likely in PATA mode rather than ACHI/native mode for it to work at its true speed and correct minimal latency. The simple difference of the two modes alone is very noticeable.

PS: Lose the red centred comic sans.

i love red comic sans

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