Quicksilver is MESSED UP!

[Carboy7]

You guys remember the old post about that Quicksilver G4 refusing to boot properly? It's at it again!

This god-damn machine refused to read CDs, would not boot off the internal HDD, and would only work properly once I linked it to my iMac G3/600 Dalmatian in Target Disk mode. It booted 10.4.11, and I saw the internal HDD on the desktop, with the creative name "NO NAME". I looked at it, and it is MS-DOS FORMATTED!!! :O How even... What what what the heck?

Since you can only format hard drives with the machine recovery CD/DVD, and the CD drive won't work, what the heck do I do? Ugh...

Also, the PRAM settings are messed up as well!

 

[Floofies]

I'd test the drive with Disk Utility, then create a GParted LiveCD or Ubuntu LiveCD, you can use GParted to get an accurate overview of what's on the drive.

 

[Compgeke]

Disk utility will allow you to format\partition drives no problem, but I'd be swapping the hard drive out to try and rule that out as the issue. Showing up as a sub-1MB FAT16 drive is quite off. If you open Disk Utility (Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility) does it correctly identify the drive model and size?

 

[Carboy7]

Yes, it does! Also, I was wrong when I said

you can only format hard drives with the machine recovery CD/DVD

because you can with Disk Utility, apparently! (Just not when that drive is the main one running the OS you're in. That's why I have the iMac here.)

I formatted it with the Mac OS Extended format, and it has been brought to its 300GB glory again! Now to get an OS on there...

 

[bunnspecial]

Just be sure when you format it as HFS extended, you click the "options" button and select "Apple Partition Map" from the menu that comes up. Neither MBR nor GUID will boot on PPC Macs.

(as a side note, despite a lot of information out there to the contrary, many Intel Macs will actually boot off APM volumes)