Drive not recognized

[Quadraman]

I'm trying to get one of my beige G3 towers running and have a Western Digital 205AA drive with the Apple logo on it. I have it installed and am able to load MacOS 9.2 from CD but when I try to use Drive Setup to initialize the drive for an installation, it sees the drive on the bus but says volume not recognized and I can't do an install. What's the problem here?

 

[PowerPup]

If the Hard Drive was previously used in a PC it might have (somehow) changed something so Device Setup no longer recognizes it. Or something like that.

If you have a Mac OS X CD (the beige G3 officially supports up to 10.2) you could boot up from it in you beige G3 and use Disk Utility to format the Hard Drive to HFS+ with "Install Mac OS 9 Drivers" checked. Then boot the Mac OS 9.2 CD and see if the installer will use your Hard Drive now.

If you don't have a Mac OS X CD that will work with your beige G3, you could put the Hard Drive in a different Mac running Mac OS X and try to format it there, with "Install Mac OS 9 Drivers" checked.

Or, if you don't have a PPC Mac with Mac OS X, you could temporarily disconnect the CD drive, boot the beige G3 with the Hard Drive you want to format, and a Hard Drive with Mac OS 8/9, and follow this guide on how to modify Drive Setup to recognize your Western Digital 205AA.

I used the guide to get a Compaq 4GB SCSI drive to work in my PowerMac 6100. I recommend making a copy of Drive Setup to use when modifying. That way you have a backup of the original.

Hope this helps.

 

[Quadraman]

I managed to get it working after some research. It looks like Western Digital drives can't be used with the jumper in the neutral position. They must be assigned as either master or slave. I think I have it in a usable position but there's a small glitch. Whenever I have an OS disc in the CD drive it automatically boots from that instead of the hard drive. I thought you had to hold C to get a CD boot? Maybe I slipped the jumper over the wrong pins?

I'll be trying my g4 450 upgrade in it next.