- Joined
- Dec 29, 2006
- Messages
- 1,177
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- Location
- California, the golden state
- Your Mac's Specs
- G4 AGP 400 MHz 1.34gb RAM
Well, I was gonna walk away from this one, but I never could leave as sleeping dog alone. hehe This is what I found out. That your computer needs do see a drive of 120 gigs or less as the main drive. If you install the driver card or software you can use the drive you have as main drive and will be able to remove the original on if you wish. So the way I see it is that you have a few choices. You can either (1) buy a new drive 120 gigs or less and use it as your main drive,(2) buy the proper driver card for your computer,(3) partition your drive to 120 max partitions, (4) or which my source didn't mention is use the software to let it see the 250gig drive. It seem that the sawtooth works just like the rest of the macs it is just limited buy the size of the drive, which can be addressed with pci card or software. I know compared to what you had in there in the first place the 135 gigs looked good but it was a shame to waste 165 gigs.
All sounds like good advice and helps me have more faith in my Mac.
That's why I started this thread, to find out more about the possibilities.
I was going to post this info. anyway to incourage other people to try, even before I saw your last post that there MUST be a way to install only one larger Master HD. Otherwise, it would be too stupid for a Mac. We all know that it is impossible to think of Mac as being stupid.
You clearified the size limitation issue very well. My new Seagate HD came with a Size Limitation Jumper Pin in order to aleviate that problem with limited Macs. But, it did not work by just using the jumper pin provided, before trying the choices you presented.
But, there is another layer to this situation. Since, I started with wanting to keep the old HD, I initialized the new HD as the Slave. My problem arose because 1) I cannot swap HDs in this G4 (it says it in the manual) and, 2) the size limitation of the HD. So, even if I overcome the size limitation issue, and I want to initialize the new HD as the Slave, I will not be able to swap the two HD2. So, I don't wish to spend any money on any Driver Card right now.
I have to start with Clean Install to try all these new options, but I think I am going to stop. I still like to have two HDs for security. Of course, one can always purchase two new HDs.
It Sounds like it is safe to say that anyone with G4 AGP who would like to have a Clean Install, could have a new HD installed as the Master Drive. Maybe it will take more spending than other G4s. In that case, you will not be able to keep your orginal HD as the Slave. Therefore, cloning or back up would be adviseable.
Thanks.