[olug] OT: Mac G4 woes

[Dave Thacker]

On Sunday 23 December 2007 18:18:03 Phil Brutsche wrote:
> Optical drives in G4 Macs drives are usually IDE, so if the thing boots
> off an IDE CD chances are you have at least one good IDE controller.
>
> Have you tried putting another IDE drive in it? When they go bad
> sometimes they just stop responding.
>
> Dave Thacker wrote:
> > My son's G4 will boot to the install CD, but will not recognize the
> > IDE hard drive.  When I run system diagnostics I get no errors, but
> > when I run hardware profiler, I don't see an IDE interface.  I think
> > that's probably not a good thing:  Questions
> > 1) Will the interface appear as IDE in System Diagnostics?
>
> Not a clue, but I would expect it to.
>
> > 2) Is there a BIOS I can get into to check whether the IDE interface
> > is enabled?
>
> Yes, OpenFirmware. Apple+Option+O+F when you power it on will get you
> into it. Don't know the command to probe the IDE bus right off hand
> though - probe-ide-all works on Suns, and OpenFirmware is very similar
> to Sun's OpenBoot...
>
> > 2) If the IDE port is dead, can I put a SCSI card in?
>
> Yes and no. The only SCSI cards supported by OS X >= 10.2 are made by
> ATTO and use LSI Logic SCSI chips.
>
> SATA and IDE cards are cheaper and much more common. For most desktop
> uses a current SATA drive + controller w/NCQ will give better performance.
>
> > 3) Are there any diag iso's I can download to further pinpoint the
> > trouble?
>
> An Ubuntu/PPC install CD might give you more verbose hardware probing...

Thanks Phil, burning a gutsy ppc CD as I type.   Dave