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HELP - hard drive not seeing full capacity??

J

jnr

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 29, 2003
2
0
london
The answer may be staring me in the face but I cannot see it!
Added an extra hard drive to my basic 27 gig g4 power mac.
Connected as a slave.
It's an 180 gig internal ata. Initialized it and appears on desktop but only to the value of 128 gig? Tried to re-initialize and used custom settings but will not allow more than 131000meg. How do I assign more space as I seem to looking everywhere but getting nowhere....

Cheers..............
 
Re: HELP - hard drive not seeing full capacity??

Originally posted by jnr
The answer may be staring me in the face but I cannot see it!
Added an extra hard drive to my basic 27 gig g4 power mac.
Connected as a slave.
It's an 180 gig internal ata. Initialized it and appears on desktop but only to the value of 128 gig? Tried to re-initialize and used custom settings but will not allow more than 131000meg. How do I assign more space as I seem to looking everywhere but getting nowhere....

Cheers..............
Click to expand...

I have a feeling this MIGHT be to do with the jumper settings. Look at your manual and see if it says anything about jumpers and hard drive size. When I installed my 120 gig WD drive by setting the jumpers different ways I could limit the capacity.
 
Depending on your model of Mac there are size limits on how large an ATA hard drive you can use. You can get around the limits in a couple of ways.

1.) Put the drive in an external firewire case.

2.) Get a ATA disk controller card that supports the newer standard. One of the 133 mhz controllers would work fine.

I don't know which model G4 you have, but check the apple documentation to see how big a drive you can handle.
 
Re: HELP - hard drive not seeing full capacity??

Originally posted by jnr
The answer may be staring me in the face but I cannot see it!
Added an extra hard drive to my basic 27 gig g4 power mac.
Connected as a slave.
It's an 180 gig internal ata. Initialized it and appears on desktop but only to the value of 128 gig? Tried to re-initialize and used custom settings but will not allow more than 131000meg. How do I assign more space as I seem to looking everywhere but getting nowhere....

Cheers..............
Click to expand...

It's IDE controller related.
Only MDD G4's and Xserves are capable of "seeing" more than 128 GB on ATA disks.

Check this out
 
Thanks

Re - hard drive not seeing full capacity......
Thanks to everybody for info regarding my problem, looks like I'm just using 130 gig of hard drive then!!!. I saved money buying the drive so it wasnt much cheaper buying a smaller one. Cheers for the link MacsRgr8, it made a lot of sense when I wasnt quite sure what was happening......
Nice one .....
 
Yeah, at least when you get a new G5 ;) you will be able to keep this drive in an external firewire case and it will still be plenty big enough.
 
You're welcome, jnr.

Like amnesiac194 said, once you get your G5, you can use it to its full capacity!

-Eple, making partitions won't help. It's a "hardware" issue. The controller only "sees" 128 GB, so 2 partitons will still only add up to a total of 128 GB.
Getting a PCi ATA-133 card is a way to be able to see more than the 128 GB.
 
Originally posted by Jerry Spoon
glad this got posted. Was getting ready to get a new hd for my dual 450 g4 and probably would have bought more than I could have used.
Click to expand...

You can use the entire drive with an ATA/133 card.
 
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