new hardrive trouble

[rdhatfield3]

I'm installing a new maxtor hardrive into an 867 tower. I cant boot from the system restore CD or anything else including techtool pro. It did at first but there was no drive available to intall the software onto. Now nothing comes up. The folder with the ? mark doesnt show either. Any help?

 

[CanadaRAM]

More detail needed in order to help. Can you be more specific on just how the machine is configured and what you did?

First: There was no drive to put software onto because you haven't initialized (formatted) the drive yet. You need to boot from the OSX CD, go into Disk Utility instead of into the OSX installer, and use Disk Utility to intialize the hard drive.

>It did at first....
what do you mean by that?

If you disconnect the new maxtor, can you boot successfully from the OSX install disk 1?

Did you remove your original drive? Do you still have it or is it dead?

You can install two hard drives at once in a G4 tower Mac. That's the best way to upgrade, put in the new drive side by side, intialize the new one and then use Carbon Copy Cloner (http://www.bombich.com/software/index.html) to mirror all your old stuff to the new drive.

If you have installed the new drive, is it the only drive on the IDE cable? If not, which drive is Master and which drive is Slave? If they are both Master, probably neither of them will work. Master and Slave are set by jumper pins on the drive near the IDE connector. Usually drives have jumper instructions on a label pasted on top.

Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com

 

[MP2]

I second what CanadaRAM said about checking the jumpers. I'd put the CD/DVD drive on the first channel set as master, and (and I'm assuming it's only one HD) put the hard drive on the second IDE channel also set as master.