Motorola StarMax 4000 Harddisk Driver Issues

[seanyang]

Hi everyone, as I know little about the Mac I am holping some of you can help me out with a problem of the old Motorola StarMax 4000

I have a test system with four StarMax 4000. Now one of them could not find the hard driver and can not be booted into the Mac OS. I doubt there's some wrong with the hard disk as I tried to replaced it with another disk from another StarMax 4000 and it worked normally.

So I found an additional old hard disk holping to replace the original one. But unfortunatelly the StarMax 4000 couldn't seem to recognize the hard disk showing a interrogation on the display. Firstly, I got the hard disk in a computer working normally under windows system. Secondly, the hard disk was produced by Quantum and the size is 4.6G.

What kind of hard disk can run in StarMax 4000 and with the proper disk what instructions should I follow to make the StarMax 4000 work?

Thanks very much and wish all of you a happy new year!

[nixgeek]

Any IDE disk should work just fine, but the capacity would be limited to the maximum supported size by the IDE bus in the StarMax. I tried googling for the actual ATA speed of the IDE bus, but had no luck. I've used a 4 GB drive and I believe even a 10 GB drive without worry. Both were IDE.

You might have to set the jumper on the hard drive to Master IIRC.

When I had my 200 MHz StarMax 4000 minitower a few of years ago, I had it running Mac OS 9.1 and Debian "sarge" just fine in a dual-boot configuration. The Disk Utility in Mac OS 9.1 was able to format the drive in Mac OS Extended format without a hitch.

[seanyang]

Thanks, it works