[G4] Hard drive installation problem

[Harry Freeman]

Greetings Kenneth ( + )!( + )

This is very good news, your solution may have something to do with 
what I read about those drives (more than likely somewhere in the IDE 
control) could protect data. What I read from Hitachi was that you 
needed a special WINTEL program to remove those protection schemes. 
However I didn't think that the protection would be in effect when the 
drive were installed in a Mac.

My question, and I don't remember is you have already said but when 
when you installed the SATA drive did you install a SATA control card 
or did you use a SATA to ATA converter and then connect that to the 
ribbon cable that Apple provided for the front drive bays. If you 
installed a SATA PCI control card then it should make any difference 
whether the drive is in the front bay or the back.

If you have "Xbench" run the application to find out how fast your 
drives are responding. If the drives (180 Gb) in the rear bays are 
responding faster then you may want to swap their positions.

Congratulation on your solution.

Best regards,
============================================

On Nov 27, 2007, at 4:50 AM, Kenneth Smith wrote:

> Ok Ron, Rich, Tom, Harry, S. Kennedy, Kathi, and Dan (I hope I didn't 
> leave anybody out), give yourselves a tentative pat on the back;  I 
> think I have resolved my problem.  I hope this post reveals something 
> new and interesting to someone among you.  My problem appears to have 
> been a formatting issue.  You may recall that I had two 180 GB IBM 
> hard drives that came on my, mirrored door, 1.42 gh computer, and one 
> drive had OS X on it.  The two drives were in the rear mounting tray.  
> I installed a new 750 GB Seagate Barracuda, Serial ATA hard drive, in 
> the lower front tray.  I installed OS X on the new drive and formatted 
> both the IBM drives.  I made one IBM drive a backup and the other a 
> place for media storage. The problem I presented to you guys was that 
> both the old drives were now showing that they were about 72 % full, 
> when they were supposed to be formatted and "empty."  Due to my 
> limited technical knowledge, I thought one erase by the OS X disk 
> utility erased the drive.  After I looked farther and discovered the 
> options for more thorough erasing, I picked the "7-pass" option and 
> now both disks appear to be showing the accurate capacity and 
> functioning normally.
>
> Thanks to all of your information and suggestions, and the research 
> that I did as a result, I had a major learning experience.  I learned 
> that the technology of my mirrored door G4 represented a significant 
> technical plug-and-play milestone by Apple toward rendering 
> insignificant the master/slave jumper settings.  I also learned that 
> the new serial ATA drives were manufactured to accommodate the new 
> plug and play technology.  There seems to be a consensus of 
> information that connections for drives mounted in the front tray make 
> the G4 operate a little slower than the rear tray connections.  Mine 
> now seems a little slower.  My new question is this:  If I move the 
> 750 GB Seagate, with the OS on it, from the front to the rear tray, 
> and move one of the rear IBM drives in the rear tray to the front,  
> will my computer still recognize the Seagate as my startup disk, and 
> boot up, or will there just be a smoky hole in the ground where my 
> computer was?
>
>
> On Nov 25, 2007, at 8:29 AM, C D T wrote:
>
> _______________________________________________
> G4 mailing list
> G4 at listserver.themacintoshguy.com
> http://listserver.themacintoshguy.com/mailman/listinfo/g4
>