I have been running two Maxtor 300GB drives in my Power Mac G5 for a while and recently was running one with Leopard 10.5.2 (main boot drive) and one with Tiger 10.4.11. My Leopard disk was getting full so I purchased a new 750GB Western digital to replace it.
I had a time machine backup and clone of the Leopard drive on an external disk so I removed the Leopard disk and installed the new drive. When I then started from Tiger (intending to format the new disk) the computer froze after a few minutes of reaching the desktop. I put in my Leopard DVD and booted from that and attempted to erase the new 750GB disk but at first it didn't show in disk utility. I reloaded disk utility and it did show but after the name of the drive "WDC7500 etc" there were several strange characters. It also showed S.M.A.R.T as not supported. Partitioning the disk took several minutes rather than the usual seconds.
At this point I thought the disk was faulty so put my original disk back in only to find the computer would not finish booting from that - it got to what should be the login screen but the login window never appeared.
I started again from DVD and used disk utility to repair the drive. I noticed that it now gave strange characters after the name of the Maxtor drive as well.
Further testing reveals that none of my three drives (300GB Tiger, 300GB Leopard or 750GB new) now work in the "upper" SATA bay!
Can anyone say from experience if this is likely to be a failure of the SATA controller or the cable?
I had a time machine backup and clone of the Leopard drive on an external disk so I removed the Leopard disk and installed the new drive. When I then started from Tiger (intending to format the new disk) the computer froze after a few minutes of reaching the desktop. I put in my Leopard DVD and booted from that and attempted to erase the new 750GB disk but at first it didn't show in disk utility. I reloaded disk utility and it did show but after the name of the drive "WDC7500 etc" there were several strange characters. It also showed S.M.A.R.T as not supported. Partitioning the disk took several minutes rather than the usual seconds.
At this point I thought the disk was faulty so put my original disk back in only to find the computer would not finish booting from that - it got to what should be the login screen but the login window never appeared.
I started again from DVD and used disk utility to repair the drive. I noticed that it now gave strange characters after the name of the Maxtor drive as well.
Further testing reveals that none of my three drives (300GB Tiger, 300GB Leopard or 750GB new) now work in the "upper" SATA bay!
Can anyone say from experience if this is likely to be a failure of the SATA controller or the cable?