[G4] OWC Mercury Extreme G4 1.4 GHz upgrade to Quicksilver 2002

[Steve Goldstein]

Summary: I upgraded my processor with the Mercury Extreme 1.4 GHz rig 
last night, and external USB Hard Disks are not recognized, and, in 
fact will stall startup dead in its tracks.

Details:  It was a pretty easy install.  But, I forgot to press the 
reset switch, so I had to open the case, press it, and re-start 
again, and then I had to zap the PRAM, and, of course, the 'puter 
booted from a different (cloned) internal drive, and I did not even 
notice it until nothing in the dock seemed to open anything.  Those 
were just the usual growing pains for a first-time upgrader.  And, my 
computer iw a lot snappier now.  (Also, earlier, I had installed in a 
new Radeon 9000 graphics card to speed up screen re-draws on the 22" 
Apple Cinema Display,and I have memory max-ed out at 1.5 GB).

But, something else really stymied me: an external USB 2.0 hard disk 
not only would not mount, but is stopped the boot cycle stone cold at 
the point that it was "looking for other drives" or whatever that 
boot-up statement is.  I turned off all the external drives (3 FW and 
1 USB), and the machine booted OK, and then I opened Disk Utility and 
found that it could see all the drives when I turned them back on 
except for the USB drive (which had been working just fine before the 
processor upgrade).  In fact, when I connected the USB drive (after 
successfully booting the computer), the progress circle in Disk 
Utility just kept spinning aimlessly.  Also, I took the HD out of the 
USB enclosure and stuck it into a FW enclosure, and it was instantly 
recognized, and it functioned just fine.  I connected another USB 2.0 
drive that I use with my PC (I Ghost my PC's main drive to it), and 
it, too, had the same fate as the previous USB drive (not recognized, 
progress circle just spins in Disk Utlilty).  Yet, all my other USB 
devices, including several solid state flash drives, a HP printer and 
a Dymo Label Writer and a Palm PDA, and, of course, keyboard and 
mouse all work fine with the new processor.   Just external USB hard 
disks won't work.

After 20 minutes on hold with Technical Resistance at OWC/MacSales, I 
finally got to a tech, and he said that they had done extensive 
testing and had never experienced that with any drives, USB, FW, or 
SCSI.  He advised that I replace my old processor and see if it still 
happens (yeah, sure, I'm going to risk breaking something by going 
through all that again).  He said that maybe some system software was 
getting in the way.  Not much help at all.

Anybody have ideas?

--Steve