PowerMac G4 Help: MDD freezes with more than 3 hard drives

[PowerMac G4 MDD]

I had some old hard drives in a drawer, so I thought that they might as well be put in one of my Macs instead of sitting in storage. I have two 500GB IDE drives and one 80GB drive, and the forth is the stock HD that my G4 came with.

The first 500GB HD works fine next to the stock one, in the main HD cage. In the 2nd HD cage, at the front of the computer, I find that adding the forth total HD makes the computer freeze a few seconds after start-up. I thought that one of my drives had its jumpers set incorrectly or something, but then I tested both individually in that secondary HD cage, and each worked fine as a third HD. Once I put them in together though, I got the freezing issue again. Does anyone know why this could be?

 

[hwojtek]

Not enough juice provided by the power supply?

That said I ran 4 HDDs in a MDD and it always worked.

 

[robertdsc]

Check your jumpers for every drive. I run an MDD Dual 1.25 (FW800) with six hard drives in it and to date it works without any issues.

While learning to build this Mac, I had a crash course in jumper setting. More often than not, one jumper was wrong and it would crash the Mac.

 

[PowerMac G4 MDD]

Check your jumpers for every drive. I run an MDD Dual 1.25 (FW800) with six hard drives in it and to date it works without any issues.

While learning to build this Mac, I had a crash course in jumper setting. More often than not, one jumper was wrong and it would crash the Mac.

The thing is, I tested the two last HDs separately and they were fine... but once I put them both in together, there was freezing. If it's the jumpers then I assume that they would have frozen the Mac regardless. (unless their presence TOGETHER screws things up).

 

[catzilla]

IIRC they all should be cable select.

 

[archtopshop]

The thing is, I tested the two last HDs separately and they were fine... but once I put them both in together, there was freezing. If it's the jumpers then I assume that they would have frozen the Mac regardless. (unless their presence TOGETHER screws things up).

If the drives work individually, but not together, then either the jumpers are set wrong, or the cable is bad. Here are your choices, since you already confirmed the drives are good.

Set one drive to Master, and the other to Slave. Test.

Setting them both Cable Select should also work. Your cable has a black connector and a gray connector. One essentially equates to Master, while the other equates to Slave. I can't recall which is which, but your MDD will remember.

If cable select doesn't work, then there's always the chance that your cable is bad--maybe has a nick in it.

I have 4 hard drives and two superdrives in one of my MDD's and they function correctly.

 

[PowerMac G4 MDD]

If the drives work individually, but not together, then either the jumpers are set wrong, or the cable is bad. Here are your choices, since you already confirmed the drives are good.

Set one drive to Master, and the other to Slave. Test.

Setting them both Cable Select should also work. Your cable has a black connector and a gray connector. One essentially equates to Master, while the other equates to Slave. I can't recall which is which, but your MDD will remember.

If cable select doesn't work, then there's always the chance that your cable is bad--maybe has a nick in it.

I have 4 hard drives and two superdrives in one of my MDD's and they function correctly.

Ah, okay. I will try playing around with it and see what's up. It's not necessary--I guess--to have all 4, but it feels awesome to have 4 hard drives in it. If all else fails, that's still over 1TB of space in a 2003 computer. Now... what the store on this? xD

 

[robertdsc]

IIRC they all should be cable select.

For my experience, I went with Master/Slave.

OP, have you considered that jumper settings are brand specific? When I was building my G4 machines, I learned jumper settings in the most painful way. I found that different brands had different settings for each jumper.

Below is a PDF archive of the four brands I was able to find info for:

http://www.darthscreencapture.com/sf/JumperSettings.zip

The PDFs inside are for IBM, Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital HDs.

Google was certainly laughing at me that day. Three hours of trouble and pain.