[G4] Re: G4 How to set your hard drive to master

[Daniel Brieck Jr.]

As a general rule of thumb "Never use Cable select mode" it can just  
cause trouble. Set it up on your own so that you are 100% certain  
that things are behaving as they are supposed to.

Here is a good diagram and explanation of the set-up being asked about.

Ignore the Brand of the hard drive, just focus on master and Slave  
idea (where the jumpers are on the back of the hard drive) and the  
graphic at the bottom of the page showing how the cables are connected.

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/faq/ata_cable_select.html

Set up your hard drive the same...

So the connector farthest from the Mac mother board is the master end  
of the cable, so if you have a drive plugged in there it should be  
set to master on the pins.

The connector in the middle is the Slave, and yes anything connected  
there should be set as slave on the device...

Now before you go and change your jumpers on the drive make sure you  
look and your particular drive, because you can't assume that the  
jumper setting are the same for your drive as shown in the web-page  
link above. Most modern hard drives will have a nice graphic or some  
kind of guidelines on the drive it-self in terms of how the jumpers  
should be set for your drive to get master / slave mode. If it is not  
written on the drive somewhere then go to the drive manufactures  
website or look at the documentation that came with the hard drive to  
find the correct jumper settings...

Once you have it all set up then go to the "Disk Utility" to see if  
the drive shows up. you may have to format it in order for it show up  
as usable...

let us know if you need more help...

Daniel J. Brieck Jr.

On Dec 6, 2005, at 3:52 PM, jennifer friede wrote:

> I have a PowerMac G4 and my master hard drive is set at 20 GB when I
> originally purchased. I want to upgrade my master hard drive. I
> purchased a 250 GB Maxtor ATA/133 7200RPM 16MB. My computer doesn't
> recognize the drive when I installed the 250 GB hard drive in P2.
>
> Does this have something to do with the jumper cable? I'm confused
> with the master/slave part. If anyone can help me out with examples or
> descriptions or links. I've done research online and found a lot of
> information but I couldn't understand what I'm not getting at.
>
> I have already purchased the same hard drive for my slave and already
> installed the proper firmware to recognize the capacity of the GB
> size.