I just recently got a Powermac G4 and was looking to completely switch to windows, selling my PC (I haven't yet). I wanted to pull my 200gb hd, formatted to NTFS with WindowsXP/Vista Beta installed as a dual boot on it.
I plugged it into the slave part of the IDE chain and took the jumper out (as the chart said that no jumper = slave), and I can't get the mac to read it.
I looked in another forum and it said something about checking that it even recognizes it by pressing OPTIONS at startup, only the current mac HD showed up. I tried replacing the jumper, no dice there either.
When I boot up the Mac with the windows HD plugged in, it has the apple logo and the circular spinny thing, then it shows a crossed out circle with the spinny circle.
Considering there isn't a bios and I'm unfamiliar with everything, how do I boot to the Mac OSX cd to possibly get to the disk utility? Or if that will even help, considering it doesn't even recognize my drive.
I'm not too familiar with mac's, so I'm not really sure what to do. If someone could get back to me on it through this post, I'd highly appreciate it. Thanks.
Your first sentence should probably read, "switch from Windows," not "to windows," right? You just hold down the "C" key upon startup to boot from the installation CD/DVD. The crossed-out circle--the infamous "no bootX". Probably confusion on the IDE chain, but others would know better. What's the brand of the hard drive?
If your cable has labeled master and slave ports then it's cable select, and your drive should be set for cable select as well. The Mac won't read NTFS right off, but it will read FAT32. Once you get teh machine booted, it may ask you about not being able to read the drive, and what to do about it. I'd choose "ignore" if it does ask, and then go to Disk Utility to format it to your liking.
Yeah...FROM windows, not to...Sorry about that. I was running on 36 hours with four hours of sleep the previous night..But anyway.
The brand of the drive is Maxtor (it's what was in the computer as well).
I'll try to give you guys' suggestions a try later on today and report back. Thanks.
It boots fine without the 2nd hard drive (slave) added ?
If so, you can format it with the OS that's running on the G4. I would unplug the optical drive and put the new hard drive on the secondary IDE bus if you are having problems on the first bus. (it sounds like a jumper problem)
If it boots now, just open your utilities folder and look for Disk Utility. Hopefully the 2nd drive shows up here. Just select it and hit the go button (I think it's labeled "initialize")
After it's done the drive should now show up on the desktop. But it's only going to show 128GB of the 200GB drive if you have an early G4.
When i stuck a 160GB IDE Hard drive into my B&W G3, OS X saw the full thing. Granted, it was one partition, but I have OS X on the "Below 128GB" Area. So it boots, and I can use the full 160GB. This is on the on-board IDE (primary channel, with an 80GB Hard drive on the slave position).
Why would it work on this, but not on another machine?
I would say, if you want to use the full drive, use OS X on it, and parition it to 80GB and when you get into OS X, partition the second into the rest. It *should* see the full thing. at least under 10.3 and up.
It is an early one..It originally had a 450mhz processor in it (now a 700mhz..and I'm actually surprised at how well it runs..I had an 800mhz pc that blew ass) and when I went to system preferences it said it was one of the AGP graphics models.
Ha! Thank you Jon. All this time I never knew exactly what cable select was all about--mostly because you never find it in Macs, so I didn't bother researching it. I thought it was something purely in the HD and the motherboard. I didn't know that that was why PC cables are so often labelled master and slave and that those cables are actually different from the unlabelled cables. This explains problems I've had sometimes. It was because I was using those types of cables that I had pulled out of PC's. An "aha" moment for me. Thanks. Here's more detailed explanation:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCS-c.html