Adding a second drive..

[revel8or]

Hey all.  I've received a G4 450 DP with an AGP card and two disc drives.  It has a smaller drive (20gb) that has OS X 10.1 on it, and it boots fine from it.  On the second drive (about 160gb?), aptly named, "mac drive," had OS 9.2.2 installed.  For fun, I switched some logical indicator, and it now boots from "mac drive," bypassing the 20gb drive altogether.  It, for all intents and purposes, seems to be an actual 9.2.2 machine, now. 

I'd like to change the 20gb drive for something that is more substantial - I have a second 360ish gb eide drive, here, and while I understand that it will need to be partitioned into smaller volumes for OS 9.2.2 to recognize, what other things should I be looking for?  If I hook it up, will it let me know that I'm a dumb-ass and need to format it before use? 

The next question: I'd like to install a cd-r/w.  It has a zip drive and a cd-rom, so which brand of internal works best with these?  Do I need to find an apple approved (and hence borderline unobtainium) approved cd drive, or will something like an M-Drive be OK?  No blue ray, just need it for stereo music tracks.

Thanks a lot, all!

[Mat]

Real formatting of IDE drives (like you can do it with SCSI drives) is often not possible anymore. Just partitioning is what you like to do. Use apples program "drive setup" and it should offer you to partition your newly hooked up HD. I had some HDs that didn´t work with master/slae jumpers and needed to be jumpered to "cable select" (both drives then of course).

I´d suggest to install a fresh 9.2.2. to the first partition of the new big HD once you are done. The inner partitions are faster, plus a 360GB drie is a lot faster than the built in 20GB ones. You will like the speed improvement.

About the optical drives; with later IDE generations nearly all drives worked well and could be used with Toast. I made good experiances with Samsung IDE burners (including DVD-RAM). They were even bootable without problems. Just get a cheap used one for 5 buck somewhere from the latest IDE generation (40x or 52x) and give it a try.

[Protools5LEGuy]

A  G4 450 DP would have the 120 Gig limit, I guess.

G4 Post QS are ready for 360 G ish drives, but we do not recommend working with partitions bigger than 180 Gigs even on supported (more than 120 Gig on internal ATA) modells.

Even some machines need the OS on the first 10 Gig partitions to boot. Anyone can confirm?

[MacTron]

Even some machines need the OS on the first 10 Gig partitions to boot. Anyone can confirm?

No. The boot volume shouldn't be bigger than 128 Gb in the G4 family, except the MDD (and some QuickSilver ) that can be up to 205 Gb. If you don't use the volume as boot volume the partition can be up to 2 TB.

[Protools5LEGuy]

I heard something about first gen. PowerBook G3 needing OS X on the first partition to be bootable.

Thanks MacTron for clearing any doubts.

[MacTron]

I heard something about first gen. PowerBook G3 needing OS X on the first partition to be bootable.

... may be. But NEVER EVER any of my post are related to OS X or whatever ...

[Mat]

But Protools5LEGuy is right. There is of course the 120 Gig limit of the internal controllers of most G4s. I didn´t think about it as I use Sonnet UltraATA cards (without any limit than the 2TB partition size of HFS+) or HD-Speedtools which enables as well internal controllers for bigger HDs. Of course DieHard and others strictly recommend to NOT use HDST, but I had no problems so far (well I didn´t need to repair bigger partitions driven by HDST so far as well).

... may be. But NEVER EVER any of my post are related to OS X or whatever ...

Thats very important, as many informations are totally confusing out there. There are these X subforums here, and any information should be strictly OS 9 ( or 8 ) as long as not specified which other operating system is talked about.

[GaryN]

Even some machines need the OS on the first 10 Gig partitions to boot. Anyone can confirm?

I'm pretty certain that it was not the machine, but early version OSX itself that required itself to be in the first 10 gigs.
Puma for sure, Jaguar maybe. By then, it didn't matter anyway - you installed OSX first on a new drive which put it there anyway.
It was an issue when you had an existing OS9 machine and drive and you were attempting to try out that newfangled blue OS everybody was talking about… After that, not so much.

[revel8or]

The person (organization?) that had my G4 before me configured this as a dual boot.  The smaller drive, approx 20gb (IBM, no less - very violating, so it *has* to go) has OS X on it, and the larger drive has 9.2.2.  I just checked, and it's an 80gb WD drive.  When I change the drives, I'm going to lose OS X and the smaller drive and run only 9.2.2. 

With that in mind, I see this as becoming my second music computer, as opposed to the XP I've been running as this will run Cubase VST.  I *actually* bought VST back in the day, and I've kept an XT running just for that program and SoundDiver.  With the G4, I'll move to pure Mac Goodness And Much Dharma For Everyone.

So, when I install the larger hard drive, I'll use the 9.2.2 iso to burn a copy of the install disc, then use *that* to partition the 360gb drive for 120gb sectors, right?

The 80gb disc I plan on keeping - but I'm going to use the Cubase backup from os9lives to create it...and I have questions about that process, but I'll move to a different forum to pose those.   I'd hate to break the silent rules of forums...then I'd be a rule breaker, and nobody would like me   I'm already in arrears in payments to my wife for her to pretend she likes me in public.  Who knows what would happen if the Internets hated me.

[GaryN]

Don't worry…we are equal opportunity haters…