Only booting with one hard drive ? :S

went to turn on my mac this morning and it came up with the floppy disc icon with a flashing '?' mark.

I have a powermac G4 Quicksilver, it has two hard drives one 40GB and one 120GB, the 40GB has OSX installed on it and is my primary boot device. the 120BG hdd has osx 10.2.1 installed just incase anything goes wrong .

so i got instide my mac and unplugged the 40gb hdd and its boots to the 120gb osx 10.2.1 just fine.

please anyone ?

i have also descovered that if i plug the 40gb back in when 10.2.1 is running it crashes

First, hard drives are not hot-swappable so you should never plug or unplug them when the machine is running.

It sounds like a problem with your boot volume. Put your install disks in and boot to the CD (hold C) and use Disk Utility to check your first drive. If you press and hold option when powering up with both drives in, it should let you choose the second drive.

Sounds like the 40 gb drive has gone bad, can you connect it as a slave drive ? then maybe you could run disk utility to see if any problems show up !!.

so if i set the 40GB to slave and try run Disk utility ?

p.s i have tryed holding down the option key already and it just crashes.

Rawkas said:

so if i set the 40GB to slave and try run Disk utility ?

Click to expand...

I'm under the assumption that the directory on the 40gb drive is bad so that it can't be booted up but then putting the install disk in and holding the c key down should have the same effect. Then the computer should boot from the disk which it should always be able to do. Then you would be able to re-install the system without wiping the drive. I figured that if you connected it as a slave drive then you may be able to copy any files that where on their to the 80 gb drive for backup before doing anything else. You will need to change the jumper pins on the drive to do that.