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[G40]

When I set up my G4 I stuck two (IDE) hard drives in, thinking one for data and audio files and the other for apps and system files.

I've noticed recently that the Audio/Data drive has ended up with duplicates of all the system folders, including applications. They don't seem to be identical to the folders on the system drive, but they do seem to have some identical files...

Apologies for my ignorance but (as someone who is a PC native and a mac dabbler) this seems very odd!

Performance considerations aside it defeats the object of having everything neatly sorted into the two drives. In an ideal world, in the event of issues, it would be nice to be able to nuke the system drive, and reinstall but keep the data...

As things stand I'd be tempted to merge the two drives to keep everything clear and simple - but will that break my system? I've got way more space than I need anyway and at this stage I have firewire and SCSI drives than I can use for audio projects, if needed...

Or am I looking at things the wrong way?

Apologies again if I'm being very stupid. I haven't plugged the machine in for over a year so I'm definitely rusty on what's what!

[GaryN]

Congratulations. I've been using Macs literally for decades all the way back to the little Mac Plus and you have managed to come up with a problem I've never heard of!
I too, have a G4 with multiple drives specifically for system/apps and audio/data etc. I cannot imagine how this is happening to you.

Seriously… this would require guessing out of the box. Stuff like:
1) Somehow both drives have the same ID# ?
2) You used a foreign IDE ribbon cable?
3) One or both drives already had System and App files before you installed it/them in the machine and you only just now noticed?

When you "set up" a computer, you normally start with blank drives. AFAIK, there is no way your Mac would write duplicate files in two locations.
So, more info is needed here. What model G4? How did you set it up beyond “sticking in” two drives?

[G40]

Thank you for confirming that the Mac wouldn't do this by itself.

I've been digging and looking at folder dates etc. The conclusion I've reached is I must have backed up some of my folders to this drive at some point and forgotten about it!

 

No idea why, but it's the only thing I can think of.

[GaryN]

I think you have arrived at the most likely conclusion.

The lesson here is that BU drives are sacred devices that should be labeled and securely stored unless/until you are absolutely certain you will never need anything they contain. If you reuse one, initialize it first.

[IIO]

this makes sense, either you or your elves must have been doing that, as the hardware or OS9 will never do something like this.

however, it is generally not a bad idea to have a second system folder on the second disk, eventually a backup, but even better a juvenile, fresh install, so that you can easily boot from the second drive when something goes wrong with #1. (note that in order to boot OS9 from a drive, the boot partition may not exceed 192 gb.)

when you make backups from your system folder and do not want it to be bootable, use disc copy or toast to make image files, as this is much faster than using stuffit.