[G4] HD slave_detection problem

[Ron Steinke]

On 12 May, 2005, at 13:22, RobertCBuitron wrote:

I have a G4 Dual Mirror Drives, OS 10.3.9, 1.25 MHz, original 80 GB HD, 
two internal  Maxtor MaxLine II  ATA/133 300 GB, and one internal 
Maxtor Diamond ATA/133 40 GB. The Maxtors HDs are connected to an ACard 
adapter ATA/133 two channel/four IDE HD max. I installed the 300 GB 
drives on the ACard, each on its own channel (in other words set to 
Master and each on their own cable), formatted, and in use. I added the 
40 GB HD as a slave (setting the jumper correctly after double-checking 
Maxtor Web site) but my  computer does not detect this new HD. I've 
checked System Profiler and Disk Utility and neither show a new HD on 
the ACard. The ACard does show in System Profiler. I tried using the 40 
GB as master by disconnecting one of the 300 GB, but to no avail... no 
detection. I've tried other configurations such as CS setting, 
switching the Master/Slave HD settings, etc. but nothing works. Is 
there a way to determine if the 40 GB HD is actually spinning ("getting 
juice") or a LED indicator light that comes on when the HD is powered 
up?

Robert,

You didn't say which ribbon you connected the 40Gig drive to. Was it to 
the same ribbon that you have the original 80Gig connected to? If the 
two drives are on the same IDE bus from the motherboard, you may be 
seeing a problem that I found in some of the Blue&White G3s. They would 
refuse to recognize a second drive on the internal IDE bus ribbon. The 
only solution that I found was to install a PCI IDE controller card and 
plug the second drive into that on a separate bus ribbon.

If you can position the suspect drive in such a way that you can look 
at the circuit board of the drive during operation, you might be able 
to see a visible LED somewhere on the board that will indicate that 
power is getting to the drive and the drive is being accessed by some 
software.  The LED will not stay lit during operation, only when the 
drive is being accessed by a program. It does not matter what the 
program is, it can be a program trying to write to it or read from it 
or simply Disk Utility trying to recognize the drive.

If the drive is active (receiving power), the LED should light up when 
the drive receives a "call" from a program. If there is no power to the 
drive, of course, there will be no light.

You could always try the drive in another machine to test whether that 
drive is good or not.

I had a similar problem with my G4 Gbit using a Sonnet ATA-133 card. I 
purchased two dual connector ribbons for the card and tried connecting 
four drives at the same time. My two 40Gig WD drives would show up 
consistantly, one id'ed as Master and the other as Slave on the same 
ribbon. My two Maxtor 60Gig drives would not play the same for me on 
the other ribbon.

The Master id'ed Maxtor would always mount at boot up, but the Slave 
id'ed Maxtor might not show or it might. If I rebooted immediately 
after not seeing the Slave Maxtor, then it would show up on the desktop 
like normal and I could use it until I shut down again. Then, the same 
thing might happen again the next time I started up. I could never tell 
whether the Slave Maxtor would show up. I finally pulled it back out 
and put in into an external FireWire box where it has worked perfectly 
ever since.

My G4 Gbit just seems to not like having four drives internally. Maybe 
the whole issue is the amount of power available from the power supply 
of the G4. I don't have any numbers for power consumption of the four 
drive arrangement, but I would have to add in the CD/DVD and Zip drives 
also to get the correct total power demand and then check that number 
against the power capability of the power supply.

You might try only running three drives at the same time. If you get 
good results from that, you may be hitting the power wall like I did.

HTH,
Ron