Trying to install 2nd Hard Drive

OK. I've been fooling around with HDs for about seven years now. I know about the pins and the little plastic nubs and the different arrangements and how sometimes things are supposed to work and sometimes you just have to make stuff up until it does. Mostly I use them as external storage. I've got HDs that work with PCs but not with macs, i've got HDs that work with macs but not PCs. I've got no idea what the diff is or if i'm just a moron.

This is my first time trying to hook up a second HD to my MAC. It's a G4 tower, 450 mghz, 512 ram, I believe AGP, running Panther. The HD isn't the original, but rather one I salvaged from a fried HP. 40 gigs. It didn't work at first, but bored and testing a hunch, I formatted and formatted and formatted it again and again, and finally, it did work. Hooray. Now that same HP came with a second drive, 80 gigs, which sure would make my life a good deal more pleasant. However, all attempts to access it have failed. When I hook it up external with cable, it simply won't find it. And when I hook it up to the inner flat cable of the machine as a 2nd slave drive, the machine simply cycles forever on the gray apple, or once, it even put up a big "No" symbol. That was less than friendly.

The drive is a Seagate. 80gb. The pin config (not the cable connect, but the one between that and the power connect) isn't like i've seen before. 8 pins, four over four.

Is there anything I can do with this, or is it scrap?

How do you have the drives jumpered? I have had the best luck with Cable Select on both drives instead of Master on one and Slave on the other in some older Power Macs I have worked with. Do you know the jumper settings? They should be on the label but if not, is there a model on the 80GB Seagate?

If that works boot into OSX and open Disk Utility in Applications/Utilities and try and Erase the drive.

Man, I never considered that I might have to change the jumper settings on the "master" too. It took so much luck and effort to get that working I fear to mess with it.

Yeah, they both got diagrams for the settings. I tried all the settings they had, I made up a few more. Nothing. I haven't yet tried to jack the thing into a PC. I had this drive once, MAC just wouldn't recognize it. Not till I plugged it into a PC and FAT formatted it. Then, no prob. I'd be doing that now but there's a thunderstorm and threat of tornadoes and everybody is so scared. Argh. Like weather is ever gonna stop me. Please.

You must be in the South East. Been tracking the tornados as I have friends that came close last night to getting hurt.

Let us know what happens when you make the drive FAT32 on the PC.

For Cable Select to work both drives have to be set CS.

KingOvok said:

OK. I've been fooling around with HDs for about seven years now. I know about the pins and the little plastic nubs and the different arrangements and how sometimes things are supposed to work and sometimes you just have to make stuff up until it does. Mostly I use them as external storage. I've got HDs that work with PCs but not with macs, i've got HDs that work with macs but not PCs. I've got no idea what the diff is or if i'm just a moron.

Click to expand...

I have a 500mhz G4 Powermac...and it can be a real pain in the butt to setup a 2nd or 3rd hard drive in these Macintosh's. In other Macintosh desktops it is much easier!

The only other suggestion's I can offer if you continue to have trouble is:

- try doing some internet search's to try and find a "pdf" version of the owner's manual for your particular model Mac desktop. It may have a more detailed explanation on how to setup a 2nd hard drive.

- here's a link to an Apple document that may help as well:

Power Mac G4: Installing Internal Storage Devices

Good luck,

- Nick

IDK man... I think this drive is shot. I simply can't get a computer to even recognize it even to erase it.

Thanks for the help guys. Those links were pretty boss. I'm gonna move some things around and try to free up a drive that I know for sure does work and see how it goes from there.