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Author Topic: Powermac G4 Quicksilver - Hard Drive options  (Read 198 times)

efunc

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Powermac G4 Quicksilver - Hard Drive options
« on: April 21, 2026, 09:59:22 AM »

Hi all,

I'm hoping someone might have some experience of ATA/SATA adapters.
 
I have 2 WD Caviar Blue 500GB Ultra ATA-100 drives installed (and a Seagate UltraSCSI attached to ATTO UL3D card, but isn't showing up on the desktop). I haven't used it for a while because I mostly use my PPC 9600/350, but I booted up yesterday and worked on it the whole day. All. seems well. I was in OSX 10.4 which was installed on both drives and it also had a MacOS 9.2.2 on both too. I set the startup system to one of the MacOS 9 installs and restarted, but after loading the ROM it couldn't find it and just hung on the flashing '?'. The problem is when I now try to reboot into startup manager the system picker doesn't see the OSX systems at all and just shows me the two OS9 systems, but fails to boot into either of them. This is after zapping PRAM and forcing 'x' at startup.

Anyway, I quitting any more troubleshooting and I'm going to order new 500GB drives and start again. IDE drives seem to be expensive new, or beaten-up if used! Are there any performance or reliability issues with using SATA drives with a suitable adapter cable? I can't afford to give up another PCI slot, so if this is basically invisible to the motherboard I'm happy to try the adapter. Failing that, I'm going to have to pay way over the odds for new IDE drives, which seems a bit daft. Anyone tried them in this config?

Thanks!
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indibil

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Re: Powermac G4 Quicksilver - Hard Drive options
« Reply #1 on: April 25, 2026, 09:14:09 AM »

Hi all,

I'm hoping someone might have some experience of ATA/SATA adapters.
 
I have 2 WD Caviar Blue 500GB Ultra ATA-100 drives installed (and a Seagate UltraSCSI attached to ATTO UL3D card, but isn't showing up on the desktop). I haven't used it for a while because I mostly use my PPC 9600/350, but I booted up yesterday and worked on it the whole day. All. seems well. I was in OSX 10.4 which was installed on both drives and it also had a MacOS 9.2.2 on both too. I set the startup system to one of the MacOS 9 installs and restarted, but after loading the ROM it couldn't find it and just hung on the flashing '?'. The problem is when I now try to reboot into startup manager the system picker doesn't see the OSX systems at all and just shows me the two OS9 systems, but fails to boot into either of them. This is after zapping PRAM and forcing 'x' at startup.

Anyway, I quitting any more troubleshooting and I'm going to order new 500GB drives and start again. IDE drives seem to be expensive new, or beaten-up if used! Are there any performance or reliability issues with using SATA drives with a suitable adapter cable? I can't afford to give up another PCI slot, so if this is basically invisible to the motherboard I'm happy to try the adapter. Failing that, I'm going to have to pay way over the odds for new IDE drives, which seems a bit daft. Anyone tried them in this config?

Thanks!

I have a SATA SSD with the "Narrow" adapter in almost all my G3/G4 Macs, which uses a JMicron chip. It works flawlessly. It only takes a little while to recognize OS9 on machines that exclusively use Master/Slave, such as a Slot Loading iMac G3 or a Cube.

https://es.aliexpress.com/item/1005007039319777.html?gatewayAdapt=glo2esp

efunc

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Re: Powermac G4 Quicksilver - Hard Drive options
« Reply #2 on: Yesterday at 07:32:22 PM »

Thank you for the tip.

I'm really mystified by this G4 booting problem. I mean, I had it working for years and was using it last week, and there's always been two 500GB PATA drives installed and MacOS X as well as OS9, no problem.

Now I cannot get it to find any hard drive unless I reformat it as 128GB! This is all since I tried to switch the Startup system to one of the OS9 system installs using the control panel. II've been testing it with my new 500GB drive I bought on eBay. It successfully formatted as 500GB with Disk Utility on startup, when booted off the system CD, but then when trying to install OSX 10.1 from the CD it just hangs. When I reformat it to 128GB then I can finally install the OS just fine. But then when I try to start up with one of my original 500GB drives on the ATA bus as well it fails to find the boot disk and just sits on the blue startup screen. I don't know what changed since it worked without issue in this config before. Disk First Aid finds no problem with the HDs. I've put one of them in an external firewire enclosre and it works fine, perfectly healthy and system files are all intact, so I'm out of ideas here.

The Mac is a 2002 G4 Dual 1GHz Quicksilver.
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IIO

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Re: Powermac G4 Quicksilver - Hard Drive options
« Reply #3 on: Today at 02:09:40 AM »

MacOS9 requires its boot volume to not exceed 192 gb, so you needed to make a partition small enough for that limit.
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