Problems with Powermac g4 MDD

[kevin242]

Hi, Ive been out of the PowerPC mac scene for a while since my beloved Powerbook g4 decided to go to Mac heaven. In the past I've had aside from the Powerbook, a quadra with classic os, several jellybean iMacs with Tiger and and an emac that ran Leopard. 2 weeks ago i picked up a Powermac dual 1.25mhz mirrored drive edition for free from Craigslist. They said the only problem was that the hard drive was removed, but after a little tinkering I realized the problem was Apple proprietary monitor didn't work and that is probably why they took the hard drive out. I reset the pram and the PMU and was able to get it sounding like something was happening, so i purchased a apple graphics to VGA adapter and plugged it into an old VGA monitor. Today I finally saw the white screen with the Apple logo. After what seemed like forever Leopard got to the screen where you install the OS, but it did not recognize my HD. Granted I only had two hard drives Im not sure if they are at a 33 66 or 100, but it doesn't even show up?

This is so frustrating, what can I do? Any common mistakes i am making? should i reset the pram/pmu again? what would you do?

Another quick question, I ended up picking up a tablet to replace my Powerbook and it does great job so Shockwave on this powermac doesn't matter much to me... is there a power pc linux that is newer which would i could use with it or am I still better off with Leopard and 10fourfox, Webkit etc...???

I'm thinking server, and simple web browsing... maybe a Word compatible word processor...

 

[havokalien]

Utility

Did you go to the menu and use disk utility? You must format the drive for the Mac to see it.

 

[kevin242]

Did you go to the menu and use disk utility? You must format the drive for the Mac to see it.

Thank you for your quick reply, I guess I wasn't clear. I did goto DiskUtility, it did not recognize the HD. Please if anyone has any advice on how I should proceed next I appreciate it.

 

[eyoungren]

Thank you for your quick reply, I guess I wasn't clear. I did goto DiskUtility, it did not recognize the HD. Please if anyone has any advice on how I should proceed next I appreciate it.

You are saying that it took a while to load up? And you have more than one drive installed?

If so, it sounds like you may have a jumper conflict on the drives. I would open the Mac back up and look at the jumper settings on the drive. You need the primary drive to be set as Master and the secondary drive to be set as Slave. OR, you need both drives to be set to CABLE SELECT.

 

[archtopshop]

eyoungren's solution is probably the right one. You can also try the following:

If you're runnning two drives in your MDD, then you can attach one to the ATA-100 bus and the other to the ATA-66 bus. The connectors are labeled on the logic board. The computer will work a little faster that way when copying between the drives because they are not sharing the same bandwidth.