03-13-2009, 01:02 AM

I have a G4 Quicksilver. It has OSX 10.4 on an 80 GB hard drive and a second 200 GB hard drive that only showed 128 GB. OSX crashed on the 80 GB hard drive. Not having the original disks, I purchased a retail version of OSX 10.4.

I also got EIDE hard drive (320 GB) that plugs into the same connector as the old 80 GB drive.

Here is what I have done and what I see…

I installed the 200 GB hard drive as the slave (just as it was before) and the 320 GB drive as the master. I fired up the computer with OSX in the DVD player. OSX only sees the 200 GB drive.

I put the old 80 GB drive in as the master and the 200 GB hard drive as the slave (just as it was originally). OSX sees both drives.

It appears new drive is not seen, but both of the old drives are seen. After I turned off the computer, I pressed the little button by the battery in the chassis thinking that would initialize something. Did not change the situation.

Is it possible that there is some preparation needed to make the new drive visible to OSX?

I am a Windows user. I was hoping the Apple would be an easy install. I have heard so much about how much easier the Apple is to work with. This is not showing up as any better situation than my Windows computers. I hope the fix is obvious and simple.

By the way, it looks like this computer does not allow over about 128 GB of the drive to be seen. The 200 GB drive only shows 128 GB. That means that I have the version of G4 Mac that allows only 128 GB.

03-13-2009, 07:37 AM

When you install OSX, if I recall correctly, you do need to prep the drive first, I don't think you can just install to it directly. Before you do the install procedure, when OSX is sitting with the pulldown menus and the continue button to start the install, one of the pulldown menus at the top would have disk utilities. Launch that, then (hopefully, if you haven't already tried this ) you should see your drive in the list. Go ahead and partition it and format it.

Then afaik, it should show up in the list of available drives to install to.

Now, I could be very wrong, but that's what I did when I put my 1tb drive into my mac pro before installing osx to it.

03-13-2009, 07:45 AM

What are the specs of your Quicksilver? The older Quicksilvers as with all older systems only can see 128GB. Your 320GB drive will never use more than 128GB if yours is not a Quicksilver 2002 or newer Mac.

The drive still should show up. When you boot from your 10.4 DVD, go to the menus up top and find Disk Utility. I believe it's the Tools menu. See if the drive shows up there and if so partition it. Like I said depending on which Quicksilver, you might only be able to get 128GB but at least it will work. Give that a try and report back. Also you have the jumpers set correctly on the new HDD correct?

Also if yours is the older system and you want the full 320 GB and 200 GB of your drives, purchase a PCI IDE controller that works with OSX (OWC has them) and the full capacity of your drives will be available.

03-13-2009, 09:41 AM

I recently took my Powerbook G4 for an upgrade from 10.2.8 to 10.4.11 to the Apple STore. All went well, they gave me the disk copy. I want to upgrade my Imac 10.3.9 to 10.4.11.
Can you give me advice on what I should do to prepare, I did backup all pertinent files. How long does the upgrade usually take.