Mac Pro 1,1 Hard Drive problem

[shardey]

First off, the hard drive is a WD Caviar Black Identical to the one apple provided (320gb 8mb cache 7200rpm). When I go to format it, it appears to be named "media" with the capacity at 0. When I open disk uitility, all the options to repair, verify, delete, format, anything isn't possible to click on.

So here's what I have done. I created the GPartEd bootable disc, and formatted the drive to fat 32 and named it boom. I rebooted and went into Windows 7 and it appeared just fine. Booted into OS X and it reverted back to how it was prior to GPartEd.

I repeated the formatting in gparted and formatted it to fat 32 again and booted to OS X and it was fine. I formatted to the OS X Journaled and it was fine. I shut down the computer to install an additional Caviar black to set it up in a raid, and when it came to the desktop it said the drive was unreadable.

What should I do now

Cliff Notes: Hard drive keeps resetting itself to an unformatted partition after the second reboot.

 

[Bear]

...
Cliff Notes: Hard drive keeps resetting itself to an unformatted partition after the second reboot.

This sounds very much like a disk issue.

If you want to keep playing with it, I suggest disconnecting your OS disk (And any other good disks you have) and trying to do a Mac OS install to the drive you're having issues with. Also you can try the drive on a different SATA port if the OS install has issues.

 

[Krevnik]

Gparted might be part of the problem as well. Apple uses GPT for their partition tables, while Linux and Windows still have a lot of legacy around MBR. If both are on the drive, it could lead to weird behavior.

I'd partition and format from OSX (you can tell it to make an MBR drive if you want) and see if it still happens. You can always reformat the partitions from the other OSes once the partition table is set.