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G4 Cube and a New Hard Drive Issue

L

LastDayBack

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 14, 2009
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Ok so I recently got a g4 Cube and have been waiting on hard drive to come in for it, it didn't come with one. I got a IBM Deskstar 120 GB ATA-100 Hard Drive which is compatible with it. Well I plug it in and start it up, I get the Flashing folder ithw a question mark on it and the face message, which means it can't find a start-up system on it right? Well this is happening when I am tryign to boot from the 0SX DVD, ver 4.11.
Well what gives, I can boot from the DVD if the drives isn't installed no problem, but as soon as I plug it in, even during the installation process the computer will freeze with the pinwheel spinning forever, I clocked it at 33 mins before I gave up. I don't know if its the hard drive or what. I tried to run disk utility on it from the DVD, but as soon as I plug in the drive while running disk utility it will freeze up on me with the spinning pinwheel. It is the drive that's messed up or what? IT seems that way cause the computer will freeze while trying to recognize the hard drive, like if there is no firmware on it. Can anyone shed some light on this?
And I know, it's retarded of me to run the machine with it outside of it's casing but hey can ya blame a guy for trying to get it work.
 
Haven't been able to yet, I am goin to try that tonight at my parents house, the guy I ought the drive from said he had reformatted it on a PC, I'm thinking that's what the problem may be cause he said it worked before he shipped it to me.
Reason 1 why I don't like eBay
 
LastDayBack said:
Haven't been able to yet, I am goin to try that tonight at my parents house, the guy I ought the drive from said he had reformatted it on a PC, I'm thinking that's what the problem may be cause he said it worked before he shipped it to me.
Reason 1 why I don't like eBay
Click to expand...

Formatting it for PC shouldn't be an issue though. As Macs can read NTFS, so you should be able to reformat it in Disk Utility even if it is NTFS formatted.
 
iBookG4user said:
Can you try the hard drive in another computer? That should tell you if something is wrong with the hard drive.
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^^^ Good advice. I had a G4 Power Mac, and if a drive was questionable I'd plug it into a spare IDE cable in that machine to check it. Unless the drive was toast I could always format it to work, even a drive going into a PC.
 
iBookG4user said:
Formatting it for PC shouldn't be an issue though. As Macs can read NTFS, so you should be able to reformat it in Disk Utility even if it is NTFS formatted.
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The Cube freezes everytime I plug in the drive, so Disk Utility wont read it.
 
iBookG4user said:
Yes, but what I was saying was that the problem would not be that it was formatted for a PC. That would not cause the issue that you are describing.
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So if it freezes when the drive it plugged in what should I do aside from getting a new drive? Is there anyways to save it or is it a waste? I would ask for a refund but the seller is being an ass about it and says there is nothing wrong with his drive and he reformatted himself and blah blah blah. Even though I told him what was said by you guys he says that it's the Mac and that it's retarded, he's prolly one of the Anti Mac guys, I hate when ppl can't be civil.

edit-He just told me it's not formatted to NTFS but to RAW, as if it were right out of the box. WIll this effect my computer's ability to read it?
 
LastDayBack said:
So if it freezes when the drive it plugged in what should I do aside from getting a new drive? Is there anyways to save it or is it a waste? I would ask for a refund but the seller is being an ass about it and says there is nothing wrong with his drive and he reformatted himself and blah blah blah. Even though I told him what was said by you guys he says that it's the Mac and that it's retarded, he's prolly one of the Anti Mac guys, I hate when ppl can't be civil.

edit-He just told me it's not formatted to NTFS but to RAW, as if it were right out of the box. WIll this effect my computer's ability to read it?
Click to expand...

Then you'll need to try the hard drive on a PC to see if it exhibits the same problems. If it does work on the PC you could try formatting it to FAT32 and then trying it on your Cube again to see if it works.
 
Just to clarify something here, from your description it sounds like you're saying that it won't boot from the optical when the drive is attached and you're trying to plug the drive in after the computer has already been powered on and booted from the optical drive. I hope I'm misreading you, but if that were actually the case then that's got nothing to do with the drive.

Assuming that's not the case, I'd suggest triple-checking how the jumpers are set (I think that's what Gav2k meant, except accidentally substituted I've for you've). Incorrect jumper settings can cause all sorts of oddball issues similar to what you're describing--inability to boot, freezes, even corrupt data. Even when being careful, I've still screwed up things on occasion.

Number one would be to make sure that it's set to Master (NOT cable detect, as I'm not sure that works on a Cube, and definitely not slave). I don't know if your cube has both the optical and hard drive on the same bus; if so, confirm that the optical drive is also set to Slave.

Further, check the other jumpers and make sure it's not set to 32GB clip or somesuch. As a side note, I believe Hitachi drives auto-select ATA speed, but I did once have a batch of Samsung drives that did NOT, and I manually needed to set them to ATA66 to get them working on old G4 towers.

You might also try another ATA cable if you have one handy--I've had those go bad on me with no visible symptoms.
 
Sorry iPhone autocorrected what I typed mate. The jumper needs to be set to master.

How the drive is formatted makes no difference the installer will sort that. The drive needs to be set to master.
 
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