Hard Drive Installation Help

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Alright, I bought a Seagate 300GB ATA Hard Drive that I want to install in a G4 Powermac (AGP Graphics). I removed the old hard drive, which was a 10GB Quantum Fireball Plus, which I believe was the factory drive, although I'm not sure it was factory. I then installed the new hard drive in exactly the same configuration, jumper on master, same cords plugged in the equivalent spot on the new drive. I inserted my OS X install disk and it booted on that, but it doesn't see the new drive. I was hoping to stick the 10GB drive in another older mac I have, and rely on the 300GB completely for this mac. Any suggestions would be appreciated...
 
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rs2sensen
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My research has led me to realize I may need to upgrade my ATA Controller chip. Is this something I could install myself? Is there any other way? (partitioning the drive in two or something...) If I must upgrade the ATA chip, what would be the cheapest one I could get that would make this HD work? This is a cheap computer, I'd rather not put too much money into it.
 
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The ata chip on the motherboard is not removable, but you can install an ATA PCI host adapter for about $70. I'm not sure why the 300 GB drive won't just work on the built in controller though. I've never installed anything bigger than 80Gig on mine, but that works fine on the built in connector.
 
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Badger

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Your model is one of the macs that is affected by a limitation of 128 gbs per volume. You can partition your hard disk so that each part is less than 128 gbs and you should be O.K. With a 300 gb disk you'll need three partitions. There is another thread about this at: http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21723. You'll get all the details there.
 
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rs2sensen
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Disk Utility reads the disk as 128 GB, so would I be able to partition it to use the whole thing? Right now it just lets me partition it up into chunks that make a total of 128GB, not 300.

I have a cpl PCs that could read the whole thing, and I might be able to partition it from there. If I did 3 partitions, of say 100GB each, would that work?
 
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100 gbs for each partition would be fine. The ATA controller only reads to 128 gbs so that's why the disk only shows as 128 gbs. I think you can partition it within the mac but I haven't done it for a long time so I don't remember the details.
 
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rs2sensen
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Alright, I'm slightly confused. How it's looking, without getting an ATA Controller Chip, I won't be able to use more than 128 GB of the drive, no matter how I partition it. Is this correct?

I partitioned it in 3 100GB parts by connecting it to a PC I have and doing it from there. When I put it back in the mac as a second slave drive, Disk Utility only saw two partitions. One at 100GB, one at 28GB.

So, my question I guess is, if I want to use more than 128GB total, must I get the chip?
 
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From the info it looks like SpeedTools will solve the issue. However, before you spend the $$$ Apple states that in order to get past the 128 barrier that you have to use the disk utilities with 10.2.4 or higher to format the disk. Maybe that's why it's not showing its full size.
 
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rs2sensen
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I just spent the money and it works! I'm running 10.3.9 on here, so that wasn't a problem. There simply was no way to format it from disk utilities, it didn't know it was a 300GB drive, so it couldn't put partitions on the entire thing.


Thanks for all the help Badger!
 

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