128 GB limit Hard Drive - All the same but different

Question

I'm currently replacing a dead drive with a Western Digital Blue 500gb in a G4 2X500. The drive is only reading 128 GB. Normally the answer to the question is you need a card.
My issue: I have another drive attached to a card that's reading 500 gb it's jumped as cable-select (which WD Documentation states the Mac doesn't support.) I've tried several combinations of attaching the drive on the same ribbon to no result. I've also directly attached it to the second ata input on the card. Nothing. I'm running out of ideas (althought I'm thinking of selecting a master/slave combination for the two drives on the same ribbon.)
Anyone have any thoughts or ideas?

Answer 1

If you formatted it on the Built-in ATA Bus, you probably ran up against the 128 GB limit due to your Hardware pre-dating the mid-2002 Macs mentioned in that article.( I must admit that article is information-dense and takes several readings to sort out how it applies to a particular situation.)
The issue I believe you now face is that different Drivers are used when connecting to the card Vs connecting to the built-in Bus.
When you initialize on the built-in Bus, only the drivers for the Built-in ATA controller are loaded onto the drive. When you look closely in Disk Utility, the active data partition will likely be about slice 3 \[partition 3], and references to it may read something like "disk2s3".
When you connect the drive to the PCI-slot Card, the SCSI driver is typically used. If the SCSI driver is not presnt on the drive \[which may be true in your case] the drive will not mount.
When you initialize the drive in an external enclosure or attached to the card, Drivers for all potential access methods are installed. When you look closely in Disk Utility, the active data partition will likely be about slice 10 \[partition 10], and references to it may read something like "disk2s10".
Once initialized on the card, all the drivers required will be present. But since the drive is larger than the 128 GB limit enforced on your Built-in ATA Bus, moving the drive back to the Built-in Bus will probably preclude mounting any partition that extends beyond the 128 GB barrier. So if you want to move it back to the built-in Bus later, creating a 127.9 GB (or smaller) partition as the first partition would be a good thing to try.
Message was edited by: Grant Bennet-Alder