Cant make Sata Drive the boot drive

[Retrosonic]

Guys, I installed a Sonnet SATA card in my G4. I then hooked up a 500 gig SATA drive to the card. The system sees the drive fine, and Drive utility sees it also.

The problem is that the STARTUP utility doesnt see the Sata drive, so i cant choose it to boot from!! What am i doing wrong?

Thanks for any help.

 

[gr8tfly]

I don't believe any ExpressCard eSATA adapters can boot.

 

[Retrosonic]

Sata

No, thats not the problem. its a Sonnet SATA card which allows any SATA drive on it to be the boot drive, The system sees the drive in Disk utility, but it doesnt see it in Startup!! Thats what I dont understand.

I used "restore" under the disk utility to copy the old IDE boot drive to the new SATA drive. Doesnt that make the make the SATA drive bootable?

Any thoughts?

 

[old-wiz]

I don't think that makes the disk bootable. When I use SuperDuper, it copies all of the data, then I see another step "make disk bootable". unfortunately I don't have the info as to what it does.

 

[gr8tfly]

No, thats not the problem. its a Sonnet SATA card which allows any SATA drive on it to be the boot drive, The system sees the drive in Disk utility, but it doesnt see it in Startup!! Thats what I dont understand.

I used "restore" under the disk utility to copy the old IDE boot drive to the new SATA drive. Doesnt that make the make the SATA drive bootable?

Any thoughts?

Good to know that card does allow booting.

The Disk Utility restore does leave the "clone" bootable. I use it exclusively for upgrading/swapping drives and making bootable backups.

Before I saw [many] posts about ExpressCard eSATA adapters not allowing booting, my first thought was a wrong partition table (APM or MBR).

Check the partition map type - it needs to be GUID for it to be bootable.

 

[madog]

Check the partition map type - it needs to be GUID for it to be bootable.

Apple Partition is needed for PPC Macs like the G4.

Does it need to be GUID because PPC Macs didn't originally have SATA drives... or does that matter?

 

[yippy]

Reformat with Apple Partition Map

At least in Leopard, and I think Tiger, GUID is the default partition scheme in Disk Utility because that is what all of the new Intel Macs need to boot from. However, for PPC (ie G3, G4, G5) computers you need the Apple Partition Map instead for it to be bootable.

To do this:

Open Disk Utility.
Select the base of the drive (not the partition, the drive itself)
Select the partitions tab.
Set up partitions how you want, 1 single partition is an option.
Click on Options, this will pop up a menu where you can select the partition scheme.
Choose Apple Partition Map.
Ok, Apply and done.

This will erase everything on the drive so you will have to re-clone everything back over to it.

 

[gr8tfly]

Apple Partition is needed for PPC Macs like the G4.

Does it need to be GUID because PPC Macs didn't originally have SATA drives... or does that matter?

Yes, I was thinking Intel. You're correct - PPC's need APM, not GUID. I really missed reading it was a G4 . I've been reading a lot lately about ExpressCard eSATA adapters, not CardBus.

Anyway, yes - it needs use the Apple Partition Map. The drive probably is GUID.

Well, I was on the right track - wrong platform (hee, that's a funny... )

 

[SmurfBoxMasta]

most all pci SATA cards allow booting from the drives attached to them, AFTER the drives are formatted and an OS installed.......

this includes Sonnet, Firmtek, SIIG, and several others, all of which I have used in both smurfboxes and many G4's too neveranottaproblemo

 

[gr8tfly]

most all pci SATA cards allow booting from the drives attached to them, AFTER the drives are formatted and an OS installed.......

this includes Sonnet, Firmtek, SIIG, and several others, all of which I have used in both smurfboxes and many G4's too neveranottaproblemo

You're saying it was the loose nut behind the keyboard that was the problem on the ExpressCard/34 reports? (operator failure)