I've been playing around upgrading an old Mac PowerPC 8500 with a Sonnet G4 processor, IDE card, etc. There have been pitfalls (yes, I realize it may not have been worth doing) but things seem to be falling together to keeping the ol boy useful.
There's been a lot of drive swapping, software installations, OS upgrading, etc. so I'm not certain at what exact point the problem began.
I have three identical 40 gig IDE drives all initialized, formatted, partitioned into 3 volumes, at the same time using the disk tools, drivers, etc of (I believe) OS 9.0.3. Two of them then lived happily in iMac G3s for a while. One was upgraded to 9.1 then 9.2.
I'm now (at least temporarily) using these drives in the 8500.
It did not happen at first but what's recently begun to happen is that, upon startup, I get a "This disk is not readable.." alert asking to initialize this disk as a 5k Mac OS partition. This mysterious new partition has been added to at least 2 of the 3 drives.
- Cancelling, the rest proceeds to load and work fine.
- Disk First Aid shows 4 volumes and shows this volume as unknown: "This is not an HFS disk"
- I was reluctant to do so but eventually opted to go ahead and initialize it confident it would only address the one partition leaving the others alone. It came back "could not be initialized".
I'm not certain but I think it may have begun after the OS 9.1 upgrade. Is it possible that the disk drivers were updated, are maybe smaller and left this little hunk of unformatted disk?
I remember years ago when formatting new scsi drives there was usually a little extra bit of unused space one could claim by just grabbing the bar and dragging it over. (I don't recall the application used). I don't see anything similar with any IDE tools I've tried thus far.
I guess I could leave well enough alone and keep hitting cancel as these disks may not be staying in this machine anyway except..
1. if you don't do so immediately the machine sometimes freezess up
2. I think I recall the same thing happening years ago with scsis used in this machine (possibly when I upgraded to 9.1 ). I don't know if there's a connection but these drives eventually crashed and I don't want to chance that happening again.
What caused this? What can I do to get rid of it or format it without risk to the other partitions?
Suggestions for other tools/applications to use.
Thanks for any help
There's been a lot of drive swapping, software installations, OS upgrading, etc. so I'm not certain at what exact point the problem began.
I have three identical 40 gig IDE drives all initialized, formatted, partitioned into 3 volumes, at the same time using the disk tools, drivers, etc of (I believe) OS 9.0.3. Two of them then lived happily in iMac G3s for a while. One was upgraded to 9.1 then 9.2.
I'm now (at least temporarily) using these drives in the 8500.
It did not happen at first but what's recently begun to happen is that, upon startup, I get a "This disk is not readable.." alert asking to initialize this disk as a 5k Mac OS partition. This mysterious new partition has been added to at least 2 of the 3 drives.
- Cancelling, the rest proceeds to load and work fine.
- Disk First Aid shows 4 volumes and shows this volume as unknown: "This is not an HFS disk"
- I was reluctant to do so but eventually opted to go ahead and initialize it confident it would only address the one partition leaving the others alone. It came back "could not be initialized".
I'm not certain but I think it may have begun after the OS 9.1 upgrade. Is it possible that the disk drivers were updated, are maybe smaller and left this little hunk of unformatted disk?
I remember years ago when formatting new scsi drives there was usually a little extra bit of unused space one could claim by just grabbing the bar and dragging it over. (I don't recall the application used). I don't see anything similar with any IDE tools I've tried thus far.
I guess I could leave well enough alone and keep hitting cancel as these disks may not be staying in this machine anyway except..
1. if you don't do so immediately the machine sometimes freezess up
2. I think I recall the same thing happening years ago with scsis used in this machine (possibly when I upgraded to 9.1 ). I don't know if there's a connection but these drives eventually crashed and I don't want to chance that happening again.
What caused this? What can I do to get rid of it or format it without risk to the other partitions?
Suggestions for other tools/applications to use.
Thanks for any help