What Order Should I Install?

E

essiecab

Registered
I am going to be upgrading my Quad 2.5 G5 Mac pretty soon with these items:

Firewire 800 PCI card (LaCie)
Western Digital 500GB Internal Drive (WD5000KS)
2GB of RAM

Is it okay to install all of these things at once, or should I do it item by item and check to make sure it's working before I install the next one? I would much rather just do it all at once and get it over with if it will work.

I have installed a hard drive before, and also extra RAM, but it was on separate occasions.
 
I would install the RAM first to make sure it is all good and OS sees it. The do the hard disk and make sure you clone the current drive over to it. Then after all is good so far, go for the PC Card lastly. These things can be the most stubborn.
 
Thanks very much for that video! So to make the 2nd drive the main drive, I would clone the 1st drive onto the main drive, and then use System Preferences to tell the OS that that's to be the main drive?
 
essiecab said:
I am going to be upgrading my Quad 2.5 G5 Mac pretty soon with these items:

Firewire 800 PCI card (LaCie)
....
Click to expand...
Why do you need a third-party FireWire 800 card? Your G5 already has FireWire 800 and it can handle more peripherals than you have.
 
Well, I had a backup drive that was connected to a USB hub because I didn't have room for it, but I was talking to the backup software people and they said having the drive hooked up to a busy hub like I had could cause problems.

I already am using one firewire port for the display, and the one on the front of the computer was the only one that the drive would hook into, but I wanted to keep that open for a video camera. The cable for the backup drive wouldn't fit into the firewire port on the back.

I guess I could have gotten another cable, huh?
 
Your Quad does not have PCI slots.
The LaCie FW800 PCI card is not compatible with your Quad's PCIe slots. Won't work.
 
???
But, on page 19 of my PowerMac G5 User's Guide it states:

"Your Power Mac G5 has three PCI Express expansion slots. You can install PCI cards in slots 2 through 4 to expand your computer's capabilities."

Am I missing something here?

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Oh. I just checked LaCie's website and I see it has to specifically be a PCI Express card. Thank you very much for pointing that out to me, I will return that card as soon as it arrives.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express

The PCI slots support only PCIe cards, there are probably FireWire cards that will work, the LaCie is not one that can be used, as it's not a PCIe card.

Please read the rest of the Page 19 quote that you mentioned -
Your Power Mac G5 has three PCI Express expansion slots. You can install PCI cards in slots 2 through 4 to expand your computer’s capabilities. For more information, see “Adding PCI Express Cards” on page 65.
Click to expand...
On page 65, you will find - no mention of PCI, only PCI Express. The connector on the PCIe cards is quite different, you can't accidentally install the wrong card, so you will find that Lacie card won't plug in to any slot.

There's a couple of choices for PCIe FireWire cards here - http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/add-ons-and-hubs/pci-pcmcia-cards
 
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