G4 not booting when slave drive is in

my G4 crashed the other week, the master HDD broke.

i had all my media on a slave drive witch still works in other computers.

i reinstalled OSX 10.4.11 but when i insert my slave drive and turn it on it doesnt boot, only gets to a grey screen. no logo. no anything.

i NEED this media, i'm a film student.

i cant afford to spend any money on anything. how can i fix it?

thanks!

You say you reinstalled Tiger. I'm assuming that was on a new hard drive that you replaced. Did you set the jumpers correctly on the new hard drive so that it's master and then connected it correctly? It almost sounds like when you put the slave drive in, the machine is trying to boot from it and can't.

Also, when you post here - please include the specs for your machine. Just telling us that it's a G4 is really not helpful.

Regards.

chscag said:

You say you reinstalled Tiger. I'm assuming that was on a new hard drive that you replaced. Did you set the jumpers correctly on the new hard drive so that it's master and then connected it correctly? It almost sounds like when you put the slave drive in, the machine is trying to boot from it and can't.

Also, when you post here - please include the specs for your machine. Just telling us that it's a G4 is really not helpful.

Regards.

Click to expand...

Thanks for you reply!

my specs are <---- over there under my name. G4 saw tooth 466mhz PPC with 786 RAM.

yes it was a new HDD, well an old one. not the broken one. its an apple 30gig HDD, the one that came with my mac and only has master = on

its not specific to what set of prongs to put the thing on...

my other HDD is set to slave because its more specific.

also i have the apple 30gig HDD on the bottom wire. is this right?

thank you very much

Master on top and first position on the IDE cable.

OK, thanks for posting back. Sorry I missed your specs - ?? As Harry pointed out, place the master drive first on the cable. Should be able to boot after that.

Regards.