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$10 G4 Desktop to Media server, Newbie needs advice!

M

Mattscattered

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 6, 2009
5
0
South east
Here it is plain and simple:

The goal: Media server for photos, music, and movies.

What I know: nuthin'
What I have: Power Mac G4 733 mhz, 512 meg Ram.
Model: M8493

-An Iomega Zip drive !?! (I think)
-An optical drive.
-usb mouse.
-No monitor, no key board - I'm getting them.
-The previous owner says the hard-drive IS BAD.

What I need: Advice and any "heads-up" you can give me.


The story: I picked it up at a charity for $10. It turns on. The fans spin up and the CPU and GPU warm up. I have plugged a monitor into the smaller graphics socket and got power but no image of any kind.
I don't want to shell out big $$$ for this thing until I know it will be worth it.
How would the experts go about diagnosing and building this tower.

Oh, I have two macbooks (his and hers) made last year. Love them. Might they help?

Thanks!
MattSCATTERED!!!!
 
If you plugged it into a monitor, even with a bad hard drive you should still see a picture on the screen like a blinking question mark. That is also the 2001 model so any hard drives larger than 120gb will cap at 128gb readable.
 
Mattscattered said:
Thanks for the tip on the hard drive. Any way around that?
Click to expand...

New hard drive.

Just get a 120gb HD. Reinstall OS and it should be fine. If you don't have the install disks, that may be a prob. Sounds like a new HD is in order. Good news is they are cheap.

That unit has a limit on the size of the HD it will see, it won't see anything over 128 GB. To get around this you can get a PCI S-ATA card or some software.

If streaming I would use the gigabit wired network, as the apple card for is the slower wireless B/G.

Try lowendmac.com for more info on your computer and specific upgrades and limitations.

I have a G4 right now. A dual 450 with 1.5GB ram. Works great for basic browsing and file server. Ram
 
Kellen: I kept that website and I am going through it now. I can't seem to find software to get around the 128 limitation. So I can't do a comparison on whether I should go hardware or software to get around that.

I discovered the monitor is defunct. So I can't count that into my equation for worthiness. I will borrow another one and try again.

Do you think that by hard wiring this into my router, it will be fast enough to stream movies, music, and photos across the home network? I could pay someone to over clock the processor. Or would it be better to just replace the mother board with a dual processor type mother board?

I'm going to pick up a new hard drive and give it a go. Any advice or other issues I should look out for?

-Mattscattered
 
The software you could use is called the Intech Hi-Cap Driver but it has it own set of limitations I have read about but don't recall the details of, so some forum and google searching might be in order.

I am a big fan of a low cost PCI SATA card as kellen mentioned really. The older IDE/PATA drives are getting harder to find (though newegg and OWC still have plenty) where a simple roughly $20 SATA card will allow full usage of any size current SATA drive with no limitations at all. For a drive price comparison, a 160Gb IDE drive at OWC (of which only 128Gb would be recognized) is $55. An 80Gb would be about $46. For comparison, at many places a 500Gb SATA drive is commonly available for that same $55.
 
Sickmacdoc:

So I need a PCI/SATA card and a SATA hard drive right?

I'll google that software this week. Thanks for the link!

-Mattscattered
 
Just save the money on the PCI card and use the Intech Software linked above.

You will have two partitions on the new drive 128GB for your OS X install. The remainder will be made available after you install the Intech driver.

Intech said:
<li type="disc">if you boot your Macintosh from another source (such as a MacOS software installation CD/DVD or a disk repair utility CD/DVD), the SpeedTools ATA Hi-Cap Driver will NOT be available to load and your drive will revert back to the 128 Gigabyte limitation -- until you reboot from a drive which has the ATA Hi-Cap Driver installed again.

The easiest way to guard against problems relating to these situations (where the ATA H-Cap driver can't load), is to partition your drive using Apple's Disk Utility. You simply create one partition with the size of 128GB, and another partition for the remaining drive capacity. What this does is ensures that if the Hi-Cap driver cannot load for any reason, your Mac will continue to see and use your drive's first partition safely with 128GB limitation back in place and not touch/damage the second partition. Your second partion will return as soon as you reboot your Mac from a hard disk that has the driver installed. See our ATA Hi-Cap User's Guide for other partitioning stategies.​
Click to expand...
​
 
If you are buying new and want a media server, I would go the SATA route.

Larger harddrives available and can easily connect more. I know it has a faster transfer rate, but I believe its limited by the bus on your model.

Plus if you upgrade later you don't have older HD's around and can reuse them.

PM me as I have a cheap 20GB HD that will work on that one no problem. I can even clone my exact machine (QS 733) if you want so that it can boot right up. Let me know!

I am also parting out your exact machine if you need anything else. For the moderators, its buried in the For Sale forum.
 
Kellen: I'm new to this forum and for some reason I am unable to find the private message button.

I am interested in the bootable hard drive as I can't find a copy of tiger.
My zip 30240 to figure shipping. Send me a price!

Edit: I think its due to a privilege restriction from my lack of activity... I dunno.
 
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