Hey all - another newbie here, with what i suspect to be a sad boot disc.

My trusty, loyal and much loved eBay special 733 (DVR108, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, Tiger for about $300 a year ago, starting many "why didnt i ditch Windoze years ago?" comments ) has 2 60gig Apple drives.

A week ago, it simply refused to boot, getting stuck at the grey screen stage. Finally found out that holdign the C key down will let me boot off the bootleg OSX discs i have and reinstalled the OS. I noted that it automatically sidestepped the Primary drive and installed itself on the Backup, which is now the Boot disc it seems..

All my data is intact (although i seem to have lost emails, but i am not sure thats not my poor setup in Mail...) and its all systems go again! A bit odd methinks...

Anyway, given the IDE has to be pushing its safe lifespan by now, I think its time to upgrade even if on the offchance its a dodge IDE that caused my minor meltdown.

So far I have learned that i wont get it to recognise anything bigger than 120gig, which is fine (i use a 250gig WD external for the big stuff and my music collection anyway) and that i need a PATA type drive (otherwise a PCI card to run SATA).

Not worth the money for the adaptor card (would rather spend the dosh an G5 if it needs a large outlay), so what spec should i be looking for exactly in a new 120-160gig IDE?

Cheers

Welcome to MTAU

That's weird.

I just picked up the same machine and it has a 160GB drive in it, which IS recognised.

I have owned the machine for a few days only so I don't know what is special about it etc... it is definitely more than 120GB.

I'm using both 40GB (IBM) and a 160GB (Seagate) in it. Actually it's just sitting there but it's still my machine.

MacTracker database (available as a free download from VersionTracker) says the first QuickSilver 733MHz machines July 2001-Jan 2002 don't have large drive support, models later than this do.
Check your machine serial number on the back of the case. first 2 characters designate the manufacture factory, the next is the year (0=2000, 1=2001 etc) and the next 2 are the week number in that year it was made. So a machine with a serial beginning SG135.... was made in Singapore in week 35 (late August) of 2001.
This will verify if your machine won't see more than 128G of drive space on each disk.

Get a 7200 RPM drive of your choice, 120G or larger if the above indicates large drive support.

Or, - You could try doing a reformat of the old disk.
If you have a utility programme like Techtool, run a surface scan for bad blocks first. If it finds some, then reformat the disk selecting the security option in Apple's disk utility app. to write zeros all over it. This takes a while, but if it finds any bad blocks it locks them out. Then run a new surface scan.
If you don't have Techtool, then just reformat it this way and it may behave happily again.

Good luck and welcome aboard MacTalk.

Cheers!

SG133... Guess that means I have an early one, and no big drive recognition.

So on that basis, what specs am i looking for in a new 120-160 IDE? Am a bit of luddite when it comes to telling them all apart

Any ideas on what happened to my original Tigel intall, and why it automatically reloaded the new install to the Backup?

MSY (and a lot of other PC-parts sellers) still sell IDE hard drives, although some may now call them "parallel ATA" or "PATA" to differentiate them from SATA drives (which are rapidly becoming the standard). Stick to Seagate or Western Digital brands.

As far as your "big drive issue", EveryMac doesn't say anything but LowEndMac says there are conflicting reports:

Finding 120 GB drives is proving difficult these days, though. If you get a larger-than-120-GB drive and it doesn't get recognised properly, you can still create a partition (or partitions) that do not go over 128 GB, and use the drive happily.

Another option, if you think the expenditure is warranted, is to get a ProJovian SUA-100 card, which Try & Byte in Sydney sell for $104. This is a bootable PCI card that gives your Mac a single, master-and-slave UltraATA/133 bus (that can let you happily and reliably use really big PATA drives) and two SATA connectors, which will let you use the new ultra-high-capacity drives.

Cool thanks guys!

So - would this plug in ok?

http://www.scorptec.com.au/product/24492

Primary goal here is restore reliability at minimal cost - 2 of these is a 200 upgrade in capacity which should be ample until i upgrade to a G5!!

Yes. That would be absolutely ideal. I feel it important to add (and Brains did address this) that even without large drive support that when you install it all you will need to do is just format the drive using disk utility (which will know what to do). Just select HFS+ (journaled) and without large drive support that 160GB drive will be 137GB. For the price you will pay for the drive it is a tiny loss of capacity.

I have an old 733 G4 lying around. Same issue, standard 128gb limit. Only way around it to my knowledge was a PCI card for either sata or a IDE card with large drive support. Problem with the cards from what ive read is that you cant install a fresh copy of OSX onto them and boot as the installer wont pick them up.

Prepare to learn then. This thread here (specifically pages 2&3) has a discussion that you may find interesting. An important note if you use the firmware hack and use a large drive as the boot disk is that resetting your PRAM (NVRAM) will disable disk access until the hack is re-applied.

That depends on the cards, and the firmware that's on the.

The ProJovian card i recommended is recognised by all MacOS installers from MacOS 8.6 upwards. The PCI-based ATA and SATA cards from Sonnet and SiiG are recognised by MacOS 9.2.2 and all versions of OSX.