06-29-2005, 07:46 PM

was getting a creaking in my pre-installed internal 160 gb HD, so I thought I'd get another one to use as a primary. I purchased a "250Gb Hitachi Serial ATA 8MB SATA HARD DRIVE" off ebay out of X server, and installed it in the upper slot and moved the 160 gb to the bottom one.

I was able to format the drive, although this was through my old OS installation since it skipped to that drive to boot. I installed Tiger, but I think it was because it was only the upgrade that it didn't load. So I deleted the 160 drive (and formated it for unix so it wouldn't load it first) and began installing Panther but after the first disk it would just prompt to load it again and not ask for the second disk.

Basically, I've tried both the 10.3 and 10.2.7 disks to load the OS, I've tried disconnecting both drives inturn, and I'm still have problems getting the G5 to not stop at both the error screens (one with what looks like a OS 9 folder with a question mark blinking) and the other (with the white apple screen turning into a circle with a slash through it) with either drive. I'm having problem now getting it boot from the optical drive, pressing the 'C' key. When I left it compeletly depressed throughout start-up I got to a termal screen which had a command line and the system time date.

Please help!!! I called apple support and my appple care just ran out and they said it would be $50 for one call. What an upgrade this has been. . .


G5 dual 2 ghz; Mac OS X (10.4); 7 gb ram

ALSO: I think the creaking was due to the directory tree which i fixed in the disk utility before I reformatted it.

In terms of trouble shooting, I tried two or three partitions for the 250 gb drive. I tried putting the 160 gb drive that came with it in it alone today to see if I could get it to work as it did before, but I still got the error screens. Maybe having two drives in (connected) at the same makes it too confused since they both need formatting again (although the 250 gb drive should have part of OSX on it and be mac formatted [journaled]) and maybe this is why it doesn't want to recognize the optical now. I don't know any suggestions would be helpful....

06-29-2005, 11:54 PM

I think what it maybe is that the 160 gb drive is (somhow) labeled as the boot drive. How do I cahange this? There is a little jumper on that drive which I swithed to the next position over, but it doesn't seem to do anything and still boots to that drive. I also tried swithing the boot drive with the pather install disk, but the error with the folder with a question mark inside it comes up and after a time it boots the 160 gb drive again. I was able to install OSX on the 160 gb drive, but still am have no luck with the 250 gb one, the one I'd like to use as my primary boot drive. How does one do this on a G5?