G4 won't see Hard Drives

[woopud]

For some reason my Quicksilver won't regonize any hard drive I put in. I tried different one which I know worked before. I swapped them with a PC and now I'm trying my Mac again but having problems. Any ideas ?

Bert

 

[coius]

try reseting the CUDA switch on it (It's a button on the board. small square with a circular button in it)

Failing that, try a PRAM reset:

Apple+Option key+P+R

Do that at startup (as soon as you hear the chime on the mac)

failing that, I would suggest if you were to keep it, I would go get a PCI SATA Card and get either an adapter for IDE->SATA or a new SATA Drive. It's going to be better in the long-run over the IDE anyways.

Does it recognize the CD drives? What about if you put the harddrive on the secondary IDE (the one for the CD drives)

I thought some of these PowerMacs had triple IDE Busses

 

[Unknown_K]

Check your IDE cable for damage, check the drives to make sure the master and slave are correct, make sure you are using the 80 pin IDE cable instesd of the older 40 pin variety, also make sure the red line on the IDE cable is inserted where the pin 1 is marked on the HD.

I ended up getting a B&W g3 with a g4-450 zif for just shipping because the IDE cable was damaged (underneeath the motherboard out of view) and HDs would not show up.

 

[woopud]

Okay, the only way I got it to boot up is by holding down the OPTION key on startup. It only sees my old 6 gig Apple HD and not the other two drives. My Primary master drive is a 33 GB, primary slave 6 GB, secondary master is my CD rom drive and secondary slave a 28 GB HD. So it boots from CD or the 6 GB drive but won't see the other two. They used to work in this same Mac.

Bert

 

[madmax_2069]

when i first got my DA G4 i was playing around in OS X (had it a few days) and i didnt hear any activity from the HDD and everything stop responding and OS X KPed on me. i tried booting back up but nothing. it didnt see the HDD when i booted up from the tiger CD. so i pulled all of the connections and reseated them and pressed the cuda but still nothing from the HDD.

i was getting mad that i only had it a few days. i turned it off for a wile and went to something else. it eventually popped into my head that the IDE cable gets bent every time you open the case. i took out the IDE cable and messed with it a bit and put it back on and it finally seen the HDD and has worked flawlessly ever since. i since then put my 120gb HDD in it as master with OS 9.2.2 and OS X tiger on it and put the stock 40gb HDD as slave and Leopard is installed on that

like others say i would just see if its the IDE cable at fault. if you have a spare IDE cable around or mess around with the stock IDE cable to see if it will start to work again.

 

[Unknown_K]

Also if you were using an ATA pci card before then the drives might need reformatted to work on the native IDE controller.

 

[woopud]

Will it work with a 40 pin IDE cable ?

Bert

 

[coius]

Will it work with a 40 pin IDE cable ?

Yes, but only at 33MB/s.

80 conductor cables are downright cheap. Head on over to newegg and get a few. They ship quick and you can get them for as little as $1.99 + S/h. So buy a bunch

 

[woopud]

Well, during insatllation of Ubuntu 8.04 it suddenly showed 2 hard drives, it wouldn't let me partition the 28 GB drive, it kept giving me errors. So I put the OS X Tiger CD in it and it let me install it on the 28 Gig drive, now I'm going to install Ubuntu 8.04 on the 6 Gig drive.

Bert