[G4] Still trying to revive the dead G4 MDD

[James Pacyga]

Richard-

You have two options...

You can buy a PCI ATA/133 controller.  This would let you use the  
Maxtor 80gb drive you have and also add 1-3 more later over time.  It  
will also be somewhat faster that the internal and likely broken ATA  
bus that was builtin.

Secondly, you could opt for a SATA/133 PCI card controller.  This  
would however force you to exchange the Maxtor for a like SATA drive  
(if this is easy enough you might consider it, if not and you never  
intend to upgrade to the G5 or newer architecture machines that use  
SATA you mightn't care).

I have upgraded my G4/500 AGP to use the SATA card from Sonnet and  
have had no problems (I did need to contact them via email for a  
firmware update to get sleep to function properly but that took two  
seconds).  The SATA 200gb Maxtor I got works a treat and is MUCH  
faster than either of my other ATA drives on the internal bus.

Either option will allow you to use drives with sizes above 128Gb.

One note, you can use http://pricewatch.com to price drives.  I have  
found Newegg.com to be a reasonable choice and ultra reliable.

jim


On Jan 7, 2006, at 06:19 , Maj. Richard H. Blount (OHMR Ret.) wrote:

> I was gifted a G4 MDD powermac a couple weeks ago. It was partially
> disassembled and missing a hard drive. Despite my experience of  
> being mostly
> a PC guy, (I am a recent Mac Convert) I was able to get things back
> together and even able to get it to boot to the CD-Rom or DVD  
> (whatever this
> thing has)  From repeated p-ram resets, pushing the little button  
> thing and
> doing the C-Opt O-F thing to reset the Nvram and reset defaults and  
> even
> buying a new hard-drive. (a Maxtor Calypso 80g) I believe the  
> primary HDD
> controller is kaput. The G4 rebuild disks continue to tell me the  
> drive is
> not supported on the ATA66 controller.  I was, however able to take  
> the
> drive to my older G4 450 AGP and it works just fine there. I even  
> installed
> OSX to the drive hoping to get the MDD to see it. To no avail. The  
> @#$$
> thing still just sits there still mocking me.I think I may have  
> even heard
> it laugh. Have I missed anything? Should I part it out (Would give  
> much
> satisfaction)
> I just hate to give up on dual 1.25's. Much faster than my regular  
> machine.
> -- 
> It is not enough to aim, you must hit.
>
> Richard H. Blount
> Maj. OHMR (ret.)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> G4 mailing list
> G4 at listserver.themacintoshguy.com
> http://listserver.themacintoshguy.com/mailman/listinfo/g4
>
> Listmom is trying to clean out his closets! Vintage Mac and random  
> stuff:
>          http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZmacguy1984