HD partitioning problems

[Mat]

Today I wanted to equip my Macs with some cheap "huge" IDE HDs I got a few days back for 15 Euros each. There are some Samsung and Maxtor 400GB IDE disks. I used Intechs HDST and they were all (5 units) recognised without problems at the internal ATA busses of my Digiatal Audio and my MDD (while other drivers are just able to use the first 128GB at the internal IDE-Buses of the macs).
It was even no problem to partition them to one huge partition with HFS+ filesystem. Everythign worked well,

[MacTron]

Let a try Apple Drive Setup...

[Mat]

No chance. Especially not as the drives are bigger than what drive setup accepts at the onboard IDE controllers (which do only up to 128GB). But the entire problem seem to be some software conflict. It is not ok that the "minimal drive setup" always appeares within HDST. You know it is the one that offers formatting of Floppys and USB Sticks when you insert them, taht appeares automatically. And it always pops up when HDST did a partition, and likes to initialize the new partition. Of course that cannot work. But I do not know how to get rid of it, ... ?

I already tried to boot without extensions at all, and looked at drive setup, if I can disable something.

BTW the disks are back, "Hard Disk Toolkit 4.5" could format them to 32 GB. So they are at least somehow usable, but not with full capacity.

Thats really a strange issue.

[DieHard]

If you have a an EXTERNAL FW Caddy/enclosure you can use the Intechs HDST to re-partition both drives; in fact I only use the HDST for external drives to make partitions 190GB or smaller (to this day I don't know of any other tool that will partition FW externals greater than 128GB into multiple partitions).

As far as the MDD Goes, You should remove HDTS (and all extensions) and use the Drive Setup, either large HD should come back to life.

The DA might be an issue so use the MDD to re-partition with drive setup and then put back in the DA and try HDTS again

[MacTron]

(to this day I don't know of any other tool that will partition FW externals greater than 128GB into multiple partitions).

Apple Drive Setup version 1.9.2 can do it.

[DieHard]

Mactron... please give the exact steps to do this with drive setup and FW drives... all large Firewire Drives I have tried a message appears saying the "drive is unreadable and asks you to initialize the drive"... but gives no option to partition it... and Drive setup will not see the drive as partitionable, so I have always used HDTS

[DieHard]

I created the "drag install" of 9.2.2 so that many MDD owners with large hard drives do not need to install OS X to get 9.2.2; Using the drive setup from the drag install will partition drives over 128GB, if you hard drive is less than 128GB and your mac will boot to a 9.X CD-ROM, than you can install 9.X via CD patch to 9.2.2.  The drag install method is quicker for MDDs and you don't ever have to take the chance that OSX will mount any OS 9 partitions.

Chris, Please post where you want...

Years ago I gave up on attempting to use one drive as my master backup system since mounting OS 9 volumes under OS X 10.5 and 10.6 will eventually write info to the volume that OS 9 cannot understand and create various Btree errors when running the OS 9 disk First Aid utility; also, I have not found a utility that can defrag any volumes over 190GB under OS 9; so as a general rule of thumb...

Use one external backup drive system for all Macs 8.6 thru 9.2.2 and different one for OS X Macs.  Also keep all OS 9 Volumes to 190GB or smaller and use Norton Speed disk to optimize (defrag).  Dual booting should be avoided... OS 9 volumes do not generate any errors if the G3/G4 is left Mac OS 9 only.

[Mat]

As far as the MDD Goes, You should remove HDTS (and all extensions) and use the Drive Setup, either large HD should come back to life.

The DA might be an issue so use the MDD to re-partition with drive setup and then put back in the DA and try HDTS again

The entire issue is totally crazy,

[devils_advisor]

i have a mdd with 400 and 2 500gb drives on the internal bus and no probs at all. the only thing is if you wanna boot into os9 from it keep it below 190 once you started os9 you should be good to go. have you checked your firmware version ?

[DieHard]

Even if the DA can see the partitioned HD; it definitely will not be able to read and write data past the 128GB mark since it is NOT 48-bit LBA compliant.  In the past I have done exactly what you did as an experiment and the DA can see the partitions (reads the partition info. at the beginning of the HD); Seeing and reading the partitions info is a totally different than writing data past the 128GB limit and you will end up with a corrupted partition/s; this is all assuming that you have the original MB in the DA.

I suspect one of your drives is bad (the one that's stuck at 32 GB), so put it in a PC and rune the manufacturers full diagnostic (you can download it from the web); you don't have to format or partition it in the PC, even if the OS does not see it, the diag will.

From the Mac OS 9 lives site:
==================
I have tested the following Macs and they can see hard drives of up to 500GB within Mac OS 9.2.2: Power Mac G4 QuickSilver 733, 800, Dual 800, 867, 933, and Dual 1 GHz with logic board 820-1342-B (QS logic board 820-1276-A will NOT work and peak out at 128 GB), and all Power Mac G4 MDD models are a go (except for the FW800 models since they will NOT boot to OS 9 directly). Also, Titanium PowerBooks of 800, 867 and 1 Ghz will work nicely. As far as the Mac OS revision, you will be stuck with Mac OS 9.2.2 only, as it contains Apple Drive Setup V2.1 that will be needed to format and partition drives greater than 128GB. We also recommend that you keep your partitions to sizes of 190GB or less or OS 9 will not boot and Norton Speed Disk V6.03 will not be able to defrag it. To clarify, if you are putting a 500GB in you Mac, simply break it into 3 partitions of 120GB for the OS, 190GB, and 190GB (format all volumes Mac OS Extended).

[Mat]

Even if the DA can see the partitioned HD; it definitely will not be able to read and write data past the 128GB mark since it is NOT 48-bit LBA compliant.

That sounds reasonable. And it is the cause why I reformatted it with HDST.

Forum data was restored after a crash... rest of this post is missing...

[DieHard]

The only reason I suspect the 400GB is having a physical issue is that you explained, "The other gone drive the 400GB one still is kind of unusable. It can be repartitioned at the MDD, but just to 32 GB, no matter what I try. And I tried a lo the last 3 hours. Using cable select, using it as single master, using HDST, drive setup and HS Toolkit 4.5 (and also tried everything at the DA as well)."

This is NOT normal and the drive (set on Cable Select) should be able to repartition in the MDD natively with either PATA IDE controller and Drive Setup. 

If you wrote corrupted data to an area of the drive that is not normally visible, you can run Western Digital Diags (in a PC) and use it for any brand drive and select "Write Zeros" quick select, takes only about 20 to 30 seconds and will zero the drive past the normal start and end clusters.  This will put the drive back to factory; I have used this procedure to wipe out stubborn Boot Sector Viruses that hide in the safe zone even after a repartition and reformat.  The "Write Zeros" (remember to select quick... Full will do every sector) option will definitely make the drive raw and void of any mis-written tables.

If the 400 GB still want partition, I am betting it will fail the long diagnostics

[supernova777]

i have always used mac os X to partition.. using diskutility.. if not installed then i boot into disk utility under X setup cd..

[Mat]

I do not use X at all. I had some computers where it was installed, but it just made problems for me.

The 400 GB disk is back as well. It was me. I was too stupid to read the jumper settings correctly, and when I first put it into the MDD, I jumpered it to "slave 32GB" not to just "slave". When it reported 32 GB at the Linux box as well I had a closer look again, and the description for 32 GB applies for the line below, not for the line above, ... stupid me.

So I am back to the question how to partition huge directly attached IDE devices (without IDE addon card) at G4s lower than MDD.
It seems HDST can use them, but I destroy the partition tables (or something else) as soon as I try to create more than one partition...

Forum data was restored after a crash... rest of this post is missing...

[DieHard]

That's funny since I was thinking to ask you if there was a 32GB size limit jumper, but I have not noticed that jumper on any drives greater that 160GB, it is usually not an option on any large drives (especially 400 GB); However IBM Travelstars and some Hitachi drives have had that option forever (it was originally made to keep the heads at 15 for some older PC BIOSes); I always have to jumper my Alesis Masterlnk 9600 hard drives in that way since the ML9600 sees a max of 32GB. I should have realized that 32GB is too much of a coincidence to have not have asked you that.  I am hoping that when I mentioned to jumper them cable select that you noticed the "slave 32GB."

The DA will only be able to utilize up to 128GB whether it is 1 partition or several smaller ones that equal 128GB; the rest of the drive will be wasted.  In the IBM PC world when a BIOS could only see up to 128GB, the fix was to use a "Dymanic Drive Overlay" which was a software based solution that emulated a BIOS that was 48 bit LBA compliant, It would replace the master boot record and do all the appropriate math...to access the physical location of the data on the drive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_drive_overlay
A free version of this tool written by Ontrack would usually be bundled with a new drive and was manufacturer specific... the real drawback was when a PC system crashed and you put the drive in another PC as a slave to retrieve the data.... it was unreadable since it was not booted with the overlay... anyway, back to the Mac...

I do not know of any "Dynamic drive overlays" written for OS 9, so in your Digital Audio G4 you are stuck with only using the first 128GB on the MB controller and wasting the rest of the drive or getting a PCI hard drive controller card.

[supernova777]

I do not use X at all. I had some computers where it was installed, but it just made problems for me.

well u know.. it has been about.. oh.. 12-14 years.. u might want to think about trying it at some point 
im thinking u have some serious traumatic memories incurred from when osx was in its infancy and had some bugs... if u use 10.3.9 or 10.4.11
they are pretty rock solid i dont see how they could cause problems really.....
not saying you should stop using os9 but to blatantly shun osx.. is a little bit strange to most people

[Mat]

I do not use X at all. I had some computers where it was installed, but it just made problems for me.

well u know.. it has been about.. oh.. 12-14 years.. u might want to think about trying it at some point 

No definitely not!

im thinking u have some serious traumatic memories incurred from when osx was in its infancy and had some bugs... if u use 10.3.9 or 10.4.11

Of course! It is slow, it is not "spacial", It is for buying every 2 years new hardware to fulfill the sharholder value, it is importunately with all the multicoloured and moving/wobbeling parts, it has a bad interface design (dock is totally crap, even if most people like it, but it stays crap), it is totally patronizing, it is Unix, it has nothing to do with Mac OS, the first version we tryed took 23 hours for installing, it was BETA before 10.4.x, it simply is totally uninterresting for me. We can discuss all this at another thread if you really like, but I would preferre to not do it.

they are pretty rock solid i dont see how they could cause problems really.....
not saying you should stop using os9 but to blatantly shun osx..

So you never tried to "really work" with a dual install, as I think. I had so many problems with 10.2.8 and 10.4.11 machines that had 9 at the same disk. Booting into 9 resulted in so many problems (while the emulation "Classic" worked ok, in that cases where Classic worked at all), but using 9 natively was always a pain. I always had the feeling that Apple forced 9 to become instable, or at least didn

[Mat]

The DA will only be able to utilize up to 128GB whether it is 1 partition or several smaller ones that equal 128GB; the rest of the drive will be wasted. 

DieHard, you are wrong. I wanted to know it exactly, and I can use 210 GB at this drive now. I created a lot of data, and got no problems with them at all. 210 GB at my 300GB disk, as one partition at my DA machine done with HDST.

So it is like Knez said at the other thread, it is not a OS limitation. I respect that it is a problem for "disk first aid" or "norton stuff" but the machine seems to have...

Forum data was restored after a crash... rest of this post is missing...

[DieHard]

I my be wrong, I am just going by my own past experience and setting up hard drives in many DAs for others.

Again... I was referring to the DA MB controller and the native setup, although the HDST driver will allow you write data past 128GB, just keep in mind it is a software driver and NOT a function of the Hardware. The stock G4 DA controller has a hardware limitation of basically 130GB unless you use software to do the job of firmware. This is a great feature of HDTS, but it is NOT a native feature of the hardware on you DA motherboard.  It is not like Apple had this secret agenda and HDTS discovered that there is no hardware limitation... they simply had really good programmers.  As a conservative, Software drivers / Dynamic drive overlays, scare me a little and I have always tried to keep things universal and NOT use them.  I suspect their algorithm will only work on 1 single partition, since you have mentioned there is no mulch-partition option

For instance... the DA now has 150GB of stuff and it has a MB failure and now you put the drive in FW case and pug it into another DA....
1) Does HDTS need to be installed on the New DA before you attempt to read data on the drive....?
2) If you forget to install HDST will OS 9 not understand the partition and ask to reformat the drive... or worse corrupt it in 5 seconds...

Also, Does the system suffer and performance issues when there is 150GB of data using the HDTS driver... ?

All these variables have to be tested and I have always went the "safe" route with other people's data.  So if I do not have the time to test all the "what if"s, then I choose the know tested route.  If I am "wrong" in your eyes... then so be it.

Since HDTS allows only allows you to only make 1 partition (and you can make it any size), then the max I would do is 190GB and not the whole drive... Then I would test the scenario of filling the drive to about 150GB and run disk first aid and defrag before I put critical stuff on it.

A second test is make 1 partition of 400GB, load about 200GB of crap and attempt first aid or a defrag....  I will SUSPECT (but could be wrong) that you will get "out of memory error" as I have in the past and you may have data issues....if I am wrong, then we will have to get your information posted for others and exactly how you...

Forum data was restored after a crash... rest of this post is missing...

[DieHard]

Chis, you will eventually see that is is not "OS X" paranoia or an "OS X sucks forever" mentality that keeps it from living side by side with OS 9 on this forum or on many G4 drives. As you know I have several Mac Pro 8 Cores that run Snow Leopard for My Logic Pro rigs.  I suspect it will take you a while, but on your G4s if you are serious about truly running Mac OS 9, you will eventually abandon the Dual Boot scenario. 

You will eventually see screwed long file names (as OS 9 can't read them), weird issues with file forks, and other weird crap errors that just get frustrating. Many of us ran both OS X and OS 9 side by side in the day (I get a lot of emails), and many also tried the OS X on 1 Physical Drive and OS 9 on another, but most in the  end, decided to try Pure OS 9; from the first boot to loading the last app... all under Only OS 9 and KAZAM !... all the little bullshit issues went away... and all of a sudden, all is rock solid !... No "missing custom icon" errors, No betrive errors, No **&@^@ mixed" in the file name, Hmmmm, think I will save OS X for the Intel Stuff.

Not saying that 10.4 does not run awesome on a Dual 1.25 G4, because it does... I am just saying I have personally avoided issues be keeping Mac OS 9 on (1) G4 and OS X on another and NOT letting them play together 

Opinions...?