New to Mac hardware

[cspears1028]

I have a Mac G4 which came with a 60GB drive. I filled it pretty quickly. I went out and purchased a second hard drive, and I installed it in my machine. Is there any way to extend my boot drive to 120GB? Using disk utility, I was able to format the hard drive, but it creates a second container or drive (I am not sure I am using the correct terminilogy.) Can this be done? Do I need additional software? Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[MacTruck]

So you have a 120gb drive and a 60gb drive and you want the 120gb drive to be the boot drive? What are the speeds of the drives... rpm, cache. If the 120gb is faster then you can download carbon copy cloner and clone your 60gb drive to the 120gb drive (easiest) or you can install osx on the 120gb drive and copy your files over to the 120 and format the 60 and use if for extra space (recommended).

 

[cspears1028]

Sorry, I guess I did not explain myself very well. Like I said, I am new to this terminology. I went out and bought the same dirve. I thought the drives had to be the same. I guess that was my first mistake. At this point I have 2-60GB drives in the machine. Following the manual, I hooked up the second drive as a slave, and the original drive is the master. I was under the impression(from previous experience with Windows, not the same I know) that I could take the 2-60GB drives and build one 120GB container. I thought I could just extend the partition of the boot drive and add the additional 60GB of space. Is that not possible with Mac? I read other forums, and they said it was possible, but the downside was that I have to reinstall the OS. I did that, but I saw nothing in the OS install which allowed me to create one partition with both drives. Am I going about this all wrong?

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

I'm sorry, but you have to get used to having to HD icons on your desktop...

Finder will display each Volume mounted as an icon, i.e. Hard drives (really partitions, so if you partition one on your HDs you get even more icons 😉), CD/DVDs, USB/FireWire drives etc., and you cannot "gather" them into a container of sorts...

 

[cspears1028]

Thank you for the information. The whole reason I bought a second drive to begin with is because the first was full, and I was unable to add more photos in iPhoto or play lists in iTunes. I added the second drive and formatted it, but if I open iTunes and try to create a new playlist, it tries to create the list on the boot drive, which is full. Is there anyway for me to have the programs see the second drive for more space, or do I have to install iTunes on the second drive?

 

[yippy]

I think you can do that using a raid array. Unfortunatly I have never used raid and so cannot tell you much more. Maybe someone else can correct me or fill you in.

 

[gekko513]

If you want to use two physical drives as one logical container, you must set them up in what's called a RAID. This can be done with both Windows and Mac OS (and most other OS), but it is quite difficult to set up. Also, the drives should be the same brand, the same size and work at the same speed to be reliable, and the possibility of losing your data because of hardware failure more than doubles.

I recommend that you keep them as separate containers. I'm not at my Mac right now, so I can't help you find out how to make iPhoto use the other drive. It should be possible, try to look around it the Preferences and other places in iPhoto.

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

Thank you for the information. The whole reason I bought a second drive to begin with is because the first was full, and I was unable to add more photos in iPhoto or play lists in iTunes. I added the second drive and formatted it, but if I open iTunes and try to create a new playlist, it tries to create the list on the boot drive, which is full. Is there anyway for me to have the programs see the second drive for more space, or do I have to install iTunes on the second drive?

You can have the second disk for your iTunes library (exlusivly if you want)...

Go into iTunes preferences and look under Advanced. There you can set the library to the second disk. (It helps if you've checked the "Keep iTunes Music folder organized"). I'm not sure if iTunes will move all your files for you or if you have to drag the "iTunes Music"-folder (normally in your user's Music/iTunes/ folder) over to the other HD...

Edit: Don't move the ~/Music/iTunes folder or the "iTunes 4 Music Library..."-files

(You move instead of copying the files by holding the command key down while dragging'n'dropping)

 

[Jo-Kun]

ok if I'm getting this right: you want to stripe both disks in one... well thats no big problem... but offcourse you don't want to lose the data you have on there now & preferably keep everything the same but have one big drive instead of two equals...

so this is what you do: first find a friend who has a 60GB or bigger Harddisk (or two smaller ones could work too) copy your system to the external drive (carbon copy clonor should do the trick) & get all your other files onto that disk too (if you have one disk that's big enough carbon copy cloner can completly clone your disk and all the data at once)

thus now your 'old' data & complete install is saved externally
choose the external drive as bootdrive (remember to turn the drive ON before booting or it will not work 😉)

if this works, reboot again with the OSX disk in your drive pressing 'c'
wich leads us to step 2: boot from the OSX cd/dvd and open Disk Utility

choose the first harddisk and go to the 'RAID' section drag both harddisks to that place wich states: Drag Disks here...

then choose 'stripe' give it a name & press create... sit back and enjoy the ride... now you schould have one 'big' disk inside the mac... if not hmm problem: you can't make a raid with your disks

reboot to the external drive again
run carbon copy cloner and copy everything back on the internal drive (if you can't make the raid, this is allso what you will be doing because the disks will probably be erased (if not... reboot back onto it and everything stays the same as before))

so if everything goes as planned you have a 120GB bootdisk with your original system & everything as before in your mac... so you can choose this drive as bootdisk.

delete all data from the borrowed disk and return it...

Job done 😉

one warning with Striped disks: they save parts of the files on both disks so if one of the disks fails later on... everything will be lost...

have fun

J