I'm trying to install a new Western digital Caviar hard drive into my G5, but the system won't recognize that it is connected. Could it be that there is some sort of driver i need to install before it will work?
Also, I'm trying to install osx 10.4 and i don't have any other hard drives in the computer. I do have an old hard drive which has 10.4 on it if that helps anything.
The question is, is it a SATA2 drive? and if I remember correctly on the G5's it's regular SATA which could explain why its not seeing it unless you use a jumper on the hard drive to set it to SATA 1.5 speeds for it to pick up.
As I had this same problem on the PC with a SATA2 drive.
I honestly don't know what the disk utility is. Sorry i'm really new to macs. I would like to ask if you remember the jumper setting you used on your G5. Right now I have pins 5&6 jumpered which puts it in "SATA 150MB/s" mode. The top of the hard drive also says to jumper pins 1 and 2 for "spread Spectrum Clocking". Is that something i should try?
You'll need to use Disk Utility to give the drive a partition map and format it (HFS+ Journalled). It won't show up in the OS X installer until you've formatted it.
Thanks for the advice, I had no idea. So how do i access the disk utility to format the drive? I'm used to just seeing the installer start automatically.