Just a note here for anyone who may be interested. According to all the written documentation I can find online, Leopard and Snow Leopard are not supposed to be able to boot a PPC Mac from a hard drive that is larger than 2.2 TB. After that, when you go to partition and format, the documentation says that Disk Utility will force you to use GUID partitioning, which states that it cannot boot a PPC Mac (it CAN boot Intel Macs, apparently).
I purchased a 4 TB WD Blue hard drive for my "new" G5 Quad without knowing this, after the 2 TB drive I had intended to buy was out of stock. For an extra $5 (yes, just $5!) I could get the same drive as 4 TB instead of 2 TB. $5 seemed like a pretty good price to double the disk size, so I went for it. I booted "stock" Leopard from another installed drive, a 500 MB one, and tried to use it to partition and format the 4 TB drive into two 2 TB partitions of Mac OS Journaled. It allowed to do this AND surprisingly, it automatically selected Apple Partitioning, which says it CAN boot a PPC Mac. Interesting... the documentation said it would force GUID partitioning...
I then copied the Sorbet Leopard installable DMG image onto the 500 MB boot volume and tried to install it to the first of the two 2 TB partitions on the 4 TB drive. This failed miserably, with Disk Utility giving me a meaningless error about the operation timing out. After unsuccessfully trying every combination of things I could think of, I concluded that perhaps the documentation was right and the install of Sorbet was failing because the hard drive I was trying to install on could not be booted.
However, not one to give up easily (the 4 TB drive was the only other drive I had for the Quad and I really wanted to be able to use it), I installed Carbon Copy Cloner 3.4.3 (CCC) onto the system, mounted the Sorbet DMG and had CCC clone it onto the first of the two 2 TB partitions. Much to my surprise (and relief), this worked (!), and CCC said that the result was bootable. So I tried it...
Sure enough, it booted like a champ and is now the main boot volume for this new Quad.
SO... if you are wishing to boot a PPC Mac from a hard drive that is larger than 2.2 TB, fear not. Using CCC seems to get you around the limitation, at least when booting Sorbet. Whether or not the result is stable in the long term remains to be seen, but it is working well for now.
I purchased a 4 TB WD Blue hard drive for my "new" G5 Quad without knowing this, after the 2 TB drive I had intended to buy was out of stock. For an extra $5 (yes, just $5!) I could get the same drive as 4 TB instead of 2 TB. $5 seemed like a pretty good price to double the disk size, so I went for it. I booted "stock" Leopard from another installed drive, a 500 MB one, and tried to use it to partition and format the 4 TB drive into two 2 TB partitions of Mac OS Journaled. It allowed to do this AND surprisingly, it automatically selected Apple Partitioning, which says it CAN boot a PPC Mac. Interesting... the documentation said it would force GUID partitioning...
I then copied the Sorbet Leopard installable DMG image onto the 500 MB boot volume and tried to install it to the first of the two 2 TB partitions on the 4 TB drive. This failed miserably, with Disk Utility giving me a meaningless error about the operation timing out. After unsuccessfully trying every combination of things I could think of, I concluded that perhaps the documentation was right and the install of Sorbet was failing because the hard drive I was trying to install on could not be booted.
However, not one to give up easily (the 4 TB drive was the only other drive I had for the Quad and I really wanted to be able to use it), I installed Carbon Copy Cloner 3.4.3 (CCC) onto the system, mounted the Sorbet DMG and had CCC clone it onto the first of the two 2 TB partitions. Much to my surprise (and relief), this worked (!), and CCC said that the result was bootable. So I tried it...
Sure enough, it booted like a champ and is now the main boot volume for this new Quad.
SO... if you are wishing to boot a PPC Mac from a hard drive that is larger than 2.2 TB, fear not. Using CCC seems to get you around the limitation, at least when booting Sorbet. Whether or not the result is stable in the long term remains to be seen, but it is working well for now.
