Hard drives bigger than 120 GB

[matahaze]

HI GUYZ!
did any of you experienced a drive not been recognized if the size is more than 120GB?
I'll explain:
I have got 2 Powermacs:
1) Quicksilver G4 867MHz
1) powermac G4 400MHz with AGP.
none of them can see a drive bigger than 120GB..even thought the one I just bought is 300GB...
any suggestion?I mean is it a capacity problem?do I need to upgrade some sort of firmware to allow the computer to see the drive?

 

[generik]

It has something to do with addressing, I think your old macs can't "see" beyond 48 bits of disk space, and hence that limitation

Why not buy a Mini?

 

[robbieduncan]

If you get a PCI controller card you can use bigger disks. Make sure you buy one with OSX drivers though!

 

[robbieduncan]

You are in the UK so a few links to the sort of thing you need might be helpfull!

For Parallel ATA (older drives)

For Seriel ARA (newer drives)

 

[matahaze]

thank you guys...
you are fantastic!

 

[Whyren]

This article from Apple's KBase may help as well:

86178: Macintosh: Using 128 GB or Larger ATA Hard Drives

Basically, you need at least OS 10.2 and a computer introduced after June 2002 (I got extremely lucky that my Quicksilver does support larger drives).

 

[MikeGA]

If you download MacTracker, it will tell you whether each Mac model supports large drives (larger than 120Gb). That could be helpful