New to me Mac - Old Windows Drives

srcurran

Registered
I just picked up an old PowerMac G4 and it works wonderfully except it has trouble reading two drives that I took out of the Windows box that it is replacing. I have two fat32, ata, non-raid drives a WD-800 and WD-1600. Neither are working and they both have different problems. I have played around with the terminal and mounting the drives to no avail.
Here are the specifics:

The WD-1600
This drive is read by OS X. It used to be detected as a different type, but it just started showing up as the right drive type. The capacity in System Profiler says it s 128GB, finder's info says 148 (the correct size). The SMART status says, not supported. This drive does get mounted, however the drive name, and the file names are unreadable. I ran an ubuntu ppc live cd and was not able to mount it. It did work in Windows as of 2 days ago however.

The WD-800
This is found by System Profiler and I was able to mount it in Ubuntu. When OS X stars up I get an error message that says: "Disk Insertion; The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer."

Hopefully this is fixable without a reformat.
 
Well, do you want to read data from the drives, or is it just for using those drives as additional HDDs? If the latter is the case, you shoul definately reformat them to HFS+, as you can not take advantage of the rights management of OS X.

If you can plug them to a Windows machine, and you do not need the data on it anymore, try to reformat them and then plug them to the Mac again (if you do need it, save it on CD/DVD or another HDD. Just in case the drives are damaged). That would be the approach I would take.
 
Also, if your G4 is older than a MDD model, then you are limited to 137GB (128GB) inhard drive space. Even partitioning won't let you around this limitation. The only way around it is to install software drivers (can't remember who provides them) or install a PCI ATA controller card and hook the hard drives up to that. Then you will be able to "see" the entire 160GB of that drive. If you need more info, google "48-bit LBA".

As Damrod said, if you want to boot from those drives or install some Apple operating system on there, you must format them as HFS+. Linux would be ext2 or ext3, and you would need to boot from a Macintosh PPC-specific Linux install CD to do so.

Short answer, get rid of the FAT32 format if you intend to use those drives with the Macintosh -- go with HFS+ for an Apple OS, ext2/3 for Linux. If you wish to use the drives cross-platform between both Windows and Mac, you leave them FAT32, but you cannot use them to boot the Mac.
 
These are my second and third drives, my storage drives with data still on them. I usually run the correct format on my OS drive and then make my storage drives FAT32 so they just work.

I know all about rights issues through my x86 linux days and am ok with it. It is just my computer anyway.

I guess what it comes down to is the 160gb will work once I get the controler card, and I can move some data around to make it so I don't loose much on the 80 which will need to be reformated to get it working.
 
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