Half of hard drive missing!

neverssaydie666

Registered
i recently installed a brand new 300 gb hard driveon my 450mhz G4 and installed OS X tiger on
i partitioned it to have have two drives (one for apps and system, other for storage)
at one point my computer froze and had to reboot it
one of the drives became missing so i had to run disk ultlity to fix it
but when i checked the drive space on my storage
it no longer said 220 gb it said 70gb
and my main drive says the capacity is 128 gb
what happened to the other half and is there a way to salvage it?
 
It's the IDE controller. It doesn't support HD that large. You would need to purchase a compatible PCI IDE controller to support a drive that large. Consider that this is a computer that came out in 1999. Most new Macs will support larger drives like this because the IDE controller is newer and made to support larger drives.

Same would happen on a Windows PC if the IDE controller is too old.

I don't know whether there are software workarounds on the Mac side. I know on the PC side something like EZ-BIOS for example would allow the PC to see the full size of the drive. Do a search for threads similar to yours. I know the software solutions have been posted there.
 
'nixgeek' suggests a valid option, should you desire to install the newly purchased (>130 GB) hard drive in the 450 MHz G4 PowerMac.

Another option is to install the new hard drive into an external enclosure.
Some sources to such enclosures are available via this 'Google' link.
You may notice that there are Firewire only, USB only, and Firewire / USB capable enclosures available. It is best to consider the Firewire only, or Firewire / USB capable models - and use the Firewire feature.
Firewire was designed for high speed data communications; whereas, USB allows for such, but was not specifically designed for such.
 
barhar said:
'nixgeek' suggests a valid option, should you desire to install the newly purchased (>130 GB) hard drive in the 450 MHz G4 PowerMac.

Another option is to install the new hard drive into an external enclosure.
Such sources are available via this 'Google' link.
You may notice that there are Firewire only, USB only, and Firewire / USB capable enclosures available. It is best to consider the Firewire only, or Firewire / USB capable models - and use the Firewire feature.
Firewire was designed for high speed data communications; whereas, USB allows for such, but was not specifically designed for such.

So true. Thanks for the addendum. :D
 
There is a software workaround as well, there was much talk on that topic in recent days/weeks. But the software was pretty expensive IMO, so I would rather go for the PCI IDE Controller solution
 
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