setting up a G4 Tower Quicksilver 933 MHz

[MBongo]

There’s an Apple Nvidia GeForce 4 32MB AGP DVI ADC 603-1263 630-4023 on eBay right now (San Diego) $25.00!

 

[Phipli]

There’s an Apple Nvidia GeForce 4 32MB AGP DVI ADC 603-1263 630-4023 on eBay right now (San Diego) $25.00!

That isn't the same as a Geforce 4 Titanium 4600. Similar name, much less good card.

Or do you just mean because it has DVI?

 

[MBongo]

Exactly. Not the same as the Geforce 4 Ti 4600. But it'll get ya DVI.
(And for a price much less than the Geforce 4 Ti 4600.)

 

[volvo242gt]

There's also the Radeon 9000, found in a lot of the Firewire 400 MDD machines. Running that in my G4 DA.

 

[LaPorta]

I mean VGA is a fine option, that’s all I use. Or I could get you one of the 17” cinema displays!

 

[bigmessowires]

I'm curious how the performance of that card compares to the 64MB GeForce 4 MX that I have now. It only has half the video memory. It's described as a "GeForce 4" but to my knowledge there should be a suffix there, either MX or Ti. If it's an MX then I would assume it's very similar to the card that I have now, except with DVI and less video memory so 3D gaming performance wouldn't be quite as good.

 

[bigmessowires]

I spent some more time playing with the G4 Quicksilver. Here's a strange one: It can't shut down! No matter whether from the Apple Menu, or from the log-in screen, if I try to shut down it shows a blue screen for a few seconds, then just returns to the screen that I was on before. I need to yank the power cord out in order to turn off. Shutdown was working normally a few days ago.

 

[Phipli]

I spent some more time playing with the G4 Quicksilver. Here's a strange one: It can't shut down! No matter whether from the Apple Menu, or from the log-in screen, if I try to shut down it shows a blue screen for a few seconds, then just returns to the screen that I was on before. I need to yank the power cord out in order to turn off. Shutdown was working normally a few days ago.

Try this from the command line :

sudo shutdown now -h

Even if it doesn't work, it might tell you what is happening.

 

[bigmessowires]

sudo prompts me for a password, which I don't have. But I'm pretty sure this is happening due to corruption or failure of the OS on the hard disk. I get the same behavior when I try to restart. If I boot into open firmware and type "shut-down", then it turns off normally. I was already suspicious that the hard drive was failing, so maybe this isn't surprising.

 

[bigmessowires]

I installed two more IDE drives in the G4: the original HD from my 6300, and the IDE to SD adapter. Unfortunately now the G4 doesn't show any of the drives, and when I hold the option key while booting, the boot menu shows a spinning wristwatch and no drives detected. Could this be a master/slave IDE thing, maybe? I thought these drives would autodetect but maybe I need to move some drive jumpers so that I don't have two masters on the same IDE chain.

 

[treellama]

The drives will "autodetect" if set to cable select, but that depends on the cable supporting CS. It's safest to set master/slave with the jumpers on each drive (including the optical, if really are installing a third drive)

 

[LaPorta]

Will it work with one of the two extras in there, but not both?

 

[bigmessowires]

It was the master/slave. I disconnected the optical drive so the IDE-to-SD would be by itself on one chain, and moved a jumper on the hard drive so it would play nicely with the Quicksilver's hard drive on the other chain. That worked. I think the IDE-to-SD is hardwired for master mode.

 

[Phipli]

sudo prompts me for a password, which I don't have.

You won't get far without that. Google resetting the password using safe mode on your OS version, or using the reset password option on an installer CD (no reinstall required). It's a 5 minute job.

Yes, macs were extremely insecure if you could actually get to the keyboard.

 

[herd]

I don't know if you care, but I think the IDE channel for the optical disk is slower. If you install an SSD as the boot drive on the main channel you would probably notice an improvement. For example, boot time should be around 30s.

Thanks for reporting back with your results; it makes this more of a discussion.

 

[bigmessowires]

I didn't know the two IDE channels in the G4 Quicksilver were different speeds, that's interesting. The boot times that I posted yesterday were all from a Performa 6300 though - I probably confused people by updating two different threads about disk issues at the same time. I still haven't benchmarked anything in the G4QS yet.

There's nothing worthwhile on the G4QS hard disk, and since that disk seems to be failing anyway, I'll just do a fresh OS install on a new disk. Password problem solved!

 

[MBongo]

“I’ll just do a fresh OS install on a new disk.”

Yay!

If you’re going to use a single drive are you considering a dual-boot scenario with OS 9.2 and some flavor of OS X?
If so, initialize, format and multi-partition the new disk with Drive Setup 2.1 first and install OS 9.2 on the first partition before installing OS X on any subsequent partition afterwards. This yields an independently bootable OS 9 - without the need for “Classic Mode” under OS X.

*You can use Drive Setup 1.9.2 - but 2.1 is better. (Forgive me if this is moot.)

Might be time to also consider the use of that adapter and SSD as a sole primary again too?

 

[LaPorta]

I dual boot my QS from a single HD with two partitions with 9.2.2 and 10.4.11. No issues…you should be happy with it when all set up!

 

[volvo242gt]

Same with my DA.

 

[bigmessowires]

Is there a disk benchmarking program for early versions of OSX that people would recommend? I've been using FWB Hard Disk Toolkit 4.5.2 on my 6300, but I'm guessing that won't run on OSX 10.4.11. I have way too many drive options now, including another 7200 rpm drive and a PCI SATA card, so I'd like to experiment with their I/O performance before picking one as the main disk for the new OS install.