Panther can't read an external SATA drive that was formatted HFS+ under snow Leopard

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A few days ago, my 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 suffered a totally unexpected flash-bang power supply failure as soon as I switched it on. :Not-Amused: Haven't had a chance to get the thing repaired yet (assuming there's anything left in there to repair - sob!), so for now I'm back to using my trusty, faithful 13 year-old G4 "AGP Graphics" machine that has NEVER LET ME DOWN (can you tell I'm a tad peeved, folks? :D) This machine has two versions of OSX onboard: Panther 10.3.9 and - on a separate internal drive - Leopard 10.5.8

Eventually I'll get rid of Panther, but for now it's useful to hang on to, as I occasionally need to use some older apps that won't run under Leopard etc.

Now to the problem...

I have 2 external SATA HDDs in docking stations attached to the G4 via a USB2 card: one is a 640Gig that was formatted HFS+ (non-journalled) under Panther on the G4, and the other is a 2TB that was formatted HFS+ (non-journalled) under Snow Leopard on the Intel Mac Pro. This latter drive is also split into two 1TB Partitions.

If I boot the G4 into Leopard, it recognizes and mounts both drives.

If I boot it into Panther, it will mount the 640Gig drive, but when it detects the 2TB one it puts up the "You have inserted a drive that OSX cannot read" message.

As both drives are formatted HFS+ (and both show up as completely healthy under Leopard's Disk Utility), I'm wondering what gives here? Is the HFS filesystem as used in Snow Leopard significantly different from its previous incarnation, such that Panther can't understand it? Or does Panther perhaps have a ceiling on the maximum size of HDD it can recognize?

Can anyone enlighten me? I'd appreciate any ideas. Keep in mind that we're NOT talking drive corruption or loss of data here. Both drives and their respective file systems get a clean bill of health under Leopard.
 

dtravis7


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I have a feeling it's a limitation in Panther and drive size. Since it's the same machine with both 10.3 and 10.5, and only 10.3 can't see a 2TB drive, that has to be it.

10.3 is so old and there were not even 1TB drives around when it was out that I can remember. Just a guess anyway.
 
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Nobody else got any bright ideas on this one?
 

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It has to be something to do with Panther. Tiger works on the same hardware. Makes me wonder, when Panther came out and apple said how high in TB it supported, there were no 2TB drives, so how did they know for sure? Again a guess. I have 2 1TB drives here. I will try one on an old Mac I have with Panther and see what happens.
 
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VERY good point, man: those max figures are all theoretical, aren't they. Many thanks for the offer - I shall be fascinated to find out the result.
 

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Ok here you go. It's what I thought but with a twist.

Power Mac G3 Blue & White 350 Mhz. 2 internal hard drives, one with 10.4.11 Tiger and the other with 10.3.9 Panther.

I own two 1TB externals. The one I hooked up via Firewire 400 and it shows up both in 10.4 Tiger and 10.3 Panther.

Here is where the fun begins. The other 1TB is USB 2.0 only. Plugged that in. Showed right up in 10.4 Tiger but in 10.3, it came up and said I needed to format the drive which of course I would not do as it's my Lion Time Machine drive! 10.3.9 Panther using USB 2.0 will not read the format. It's all Apple Journalized BTW. BTW, this was the message, same as yours. "You have inserted a drive that OSX cannot read". Look familiar? :D

So it's panther and only when the drive is connected USB 2.0!!

Hope that helps a bit. my G4 400Mhz is over at a friends so I had to use the G3. The G4 would do the same thing. It's Panther and USB with large drives. Strange but that is the findings.

I had a feeling it was something strange like that. I have had issues like this with some other computers with older USB ports.
 
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Dagnabbit, musky! Shoulda got meself a Firewire drive holder.
doh.gif


Many thanks for checking it out, mate - I owe you one.
 

dtravis7


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I was kind of shocked when it did that just in Panther with USB 2.0, but I guess you learn something new every day! Glad I could help.
 
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I bet that some clever bod out there could write a patch that enables Panther to get round the issue - but let's face it, that version is so out of date now, who's going to be interested? :D
 

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