Do you need a special mac hard disk for your internal boot disk in a G4?

[Steven_C]

Hey guys,

bought a G4 off ebay for nearly nothing. I want to upgrade the HD. Does anyone know if I need a special mac drive or is it just a matter of formatting HFS+ on a standard PC drive?

Thanks, Steve.

[fluke]

I just used a standard IDE drive when i upgraded my iMac.  Older versions of Mac OS did refuse partition non-Apple hard drives, iirc, but that's no longer the case.  There were patches available for it to work with non-Apple drives.

[midiboxxer]

In my G4 Sawtooth are standart IDE hd´s too. All work fine.

[cimo]

..any hard drive compatible with the interface will do.. there isn t a specific Apple hard drive for G4s, as mentioned if you are going to install OSX any file system previously installed will be overwritten..

simone

[nebula]

I just used a standard IDE drive when i upgraded my iMac.  Older versions of Mac OS did refuse partition non-Apple hard drives, iirc, but that's no longer the case.  There were patches available for it to work with non-Apple drives.

FWIW this stopped being true about 15 years ago.  Macs that use IDE drives don't require anything special.  And even back in the SCSI days, most off-the-shelf SCSI drives were compatible, depending on the formatting package you used.

[Steven_C]

Thanks very much for the info!  :)

Steve.

[JohnnieBee]

Hi Steve

A couple of issues with putting a new HD in a G4:

1) The internal workings of a G4 (addressing limitations) will only recognize 128GB of disc space. So if you install a 250GB HD you will only have 128GB of useable storage. If the same drive were to be used externally, in say a Firewire enclosure, the machine would see the full capacity.

2) I have had endless problems getting 2 drives to work on the internal IDE buss, especially if the drives are from different manufacturers. One has to experiment with jumper settings, the obvious just doesn't seem to work sometimes!!?

Good Luck

John

[Jidis]

John,

I seem to recall that they did have known issues a while back with using slave devices on the IDE chain. Like it wasn't actually supported, but some people had made it work (probably with the same workarounds you found).

On a side note, I run 9.2 on my G4 and swapped the internal at some point with a smaller drive I had free. It now boots really slow, like it's looking for a system disk and ultimately has no choice but to use the new one. The master/slave config is all the same, and I've used the control panel to properly assign the system drive. Drive contents should also have been the same. All I could figure was that it was brand or firmware related, but it's no big deal.

George

[smashtv]

It now boots really slow, like it's looking for a system disk and ultimately has no choice but to use the new one. The master/slave config is all the same, and I've used the control panel to properly assign the system drive. Drive contents should also have been the same. All I could figure was that it was brand or firmware related, but it's no big deal.

A "pmmu" reset should fix this, if not it's time for a new motherboard battery.  Google "cuda switch" for specific instructions, and remember -never- press the cuda switch more than once between shutdowns.  ;)

Whoop almost forgot there is a relatively cheap commercial extension somewhere out there to get past the 137gig limit. (same issue with one of our edit bays in Dallas)

Best

SmashTV