Adding a hard drive in a g4 MDD horizontal drive bay

[Richard Cranium]

Hey,

I am adding a drive into the horizontal bay on my g4. I have plugged in the power supply, and the drive cable, does this cable need to be plugged into the mother board - it is already plugged in at one end, does the cable need to make a loop? It is in there and I should be able to see it, but nothing is showing up.

thanks

rc

 

[macgeek2005]

Hey,

I am adding a drive into the horizontal bay on my g4. I have plugged in the power supply, and the drive cable, does this cable need to be plugged into the mother board - it is already plugged in at one end, does the cable need to make a loop? It is in there and I should be able to see it, but nothing is showing up.

thanks

rc

Is it an ATA/66? Otherwise it won't work.

 

[frankblundt]

the drive cable doesn't make a loop - but it should have one end plugging into the motherboard IDE controller (either primary or secondary slot), and it should have one drive plug on the other end and another drive plug in the middle.

The end plug is generally "master" and the middle one the "slave". The drive itself wll have a row of "jumper" pins next to where the cable plugs in, and hopefully an explanation written on the drive as to what pins the jumper block needs to go to assign the drive to master, slave or CS. CS means cable select and on most cables these days, the cable knows which plug is which, so both devices can be set to CS and plugged into either plug.

If you don't use CS, then the device must be jumpered to the correct setting (Master or Slave) for that position on the cable (End or Middle)

Some CD drives won't tolerate being anything other than master, and likewise the occasional hard drive (i had a Western Digital that refused to be a slave).

Confused yet?

The MDD take ATA drives as opposed to SATA (like the later G5 models), and fully support (on most models) drives larger than 120GB.

What kind of drive is it? Which plug on the cable did you plug it into and what are the jumpers set to on the drive? Are there any other devices on the same cable?

 

[Richard Cranium]

Its a 300gb seagate ata, it was in an external hirewire harddrive case but that case broke, leaving me with no way to access my back up data.

The drive is in the way you said, one cable on the controller, and one of the middle drive cable ports is plugged into the drive.

nothing happens so I dont know what i should do.

thanks for helping out

 

[Sun Baked]

You need to plug that drive into the ATA/100 controller.

There are three ATA controllers on that machine (the obvious being the Optical ATA/33).

If the drive is plugged into the ATA/66 bus -- it won't work.

Need to try the ATA/100 -- if you already have two 120+GB drives on the ATA/100 bus. It may mean you need a new PCI-to-ATA controller card.

Remember the ATA/33 and ATA/66 bus won't work with the 120+GB drives -- only the ATA/100 or newer controllers on the Macs.

Find the ATA/100 bus...