2nd Internal Hard Drive Disappearing

I have a Powermac G5 with one 400gb harddrive that came with the computer and a 750gb Western Digital hard drive that I installed about 6 months ago. I never installed an operating system on it the Western Digital drive, it was just for storage of music/photos/video. About a month into owning the harddrive the icon disappeared from my desktop and a warning came up saying "device improperly disconnected." I opened up the computer and made sure the connection was snug, which it was, booted back up and everything worked fine. That has happened 3 times since I've owned the WD drive. Now it has disappeared again, except this time I can't seem to get it back. The connection is very snug. I have unplugged the harddrive and plugged it back in, rebooted a few times and nothing has worked. It would be pretty bad if I lost this drive. Any advice?

Either RMA or put it on a PC and run WD Diagnostics, or do a full low level erase, 7-way write erase the whole thing.
I had one I bought about the same time from OWC and I think I read a bunch of reviews on Newegg about problems with a different batch.
I found a couple areas on the drive that had bad blocks. TechTool Pro media scan can find them but why it doesn't then map them out??? Intech Speedtools is suppose to auto mapout, and maybe it does (all software does is tell the drive to write a pattern 10x and read it back and mark a weak sector as unavailable.... but WDs tool was the only one that really fixed it, not Apple DU 7-way erase, and not even zero all with SoftRAID.
I have about 20 WD drives, this is the only problem I've had, from 10K Raptors to 1TB Black and Green Power and in between.
I'd pick up the 1TB Black, or a couple 640GB Caviar ($69 each! OWC). Or spurge $300 on 10K 300GB boot drive AND 1TB data drive.

Similar Messages

Internal Hard Drives Disappeared, Finder Memory Problem

Hello Helpful Folks,
I recently installed an addional internal Hard Drive, and an additional 1GB SDRAM. This worked great for a day, but the next morning, after powering up, system was extremely sluggish, and after much deadline-induced impatient problem solving, has gone from bad to worse (system refuses to acknowledge existence of internal Hard Drives). I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but as
the devil is in the details, I figure too much info is better than not enough.
Following is a breakdown of my system: AS IT LAST WORKED; RECENT UPGRADES; and MY LAME ATTEMPTS AT PROBLEM SOLVING THAT HAVE MADE THINGS WORSE. Please don't interpret my all caps as shouting, just trying to organize this post for better clarity.
System is dedicated to Video Editing with FCP 3, running under OS 9.2.2. System is "off the Grid", i.e. no network, no internet, no printer, no gaming devices. System was purchased new in July 2001, by a friend. At one point I know this system had an Airport card, which was removed prior to my purchase in 2003. I can't remember what else it may have had installed in its history, but here's what it has now:
SYSTEM AS IT LAST WORKED:
**bold items are upgrades Original Owner or I installed with no apparent problems**
Power Mac G4 "Quicksilver" 2001
867 PowerPC G4, 256 L2, 2MB L3
-1 Stick "ValueRAM - KVR 133 x 64 C3/512" in PC 133 DIMM slot **
- "Virtual Memory" was turned off years ago due to conflict with FCP 3
-2 empty DIMM slots
-1 60 GB internal HD (Maxtor Ultra ATA/100), 1 partition, formatted HFS+, jumpered as "Master" on Internal ATA 2 ID=0 (which as I understand it is ATA/66 speed)
-1 Pioneer "Superdrive" DVD-R/W/CD-R/W on Internal ATA 0 ID=0
-NVIDIA GeForce2 MX with 32MB SDRAM in AGP Slot, feeding a 17" Apple Studio Display.
-PCI Display Card "formacGA7" - not attached to any external device, not sure what its intended purpose is.**
-3 Empty PCI Slots
-OEM Keyboard attached to Monitor's rear USB port.
-Microsoft 3 Button Wheel mouse with "IntelliEye" (wheel is 3rd Button) connected to Keyboard USB port (right side).**
-2 OEM FireWire (400) ports
-2 OEM USB (1) ports
Peripherals that have worked in various configurations with this system over the past 3 years:
-3 OWC Mercury Elite ("Oxford Chipset") Externally powered, External FireWire(400) 200GB Hard Drives, 1 partition each, formatted HFS+, daisy-chained to either of the FireWire ports.
-1 Canon GL1 MiniDV camera, attached either to the other FireWire port, or to the last drive in the chain, depending on my urgency/laziness factor. BTW, FCP 3 has worked flawlessly controlling this Cam for logging and Batch Capturing.
Applications on System Hard Drive that I have OEM CDs for:
-OS 9.2 - (I think I remember that OS X was removed from system due to conflicts shortly after original purchase)
-FCP 3
-DiskWarrior (version unknown, purchased from Alsoft in 2003)
-OWC Intech Hard Disk SpeedTools ver 3.5
Other CDs I have:
OEM CDs for Power Mac G4:
-Software Install, OS 9.2, CD vers 1
-Software Install, OS 10.0.4, CD vers 1
-Software Restore, OS 9.2 & 10.0.4 CDs vers 1, Discs 1-4 of 4.
-OEM Apple Hardware Test; Power Mac G4, SW vers 1.2.1
Applications on system Hard Drive that I don't have CDs for, that I rarely use, but I'd like to keep:
-After Effects 5.0
-QuickTime Player 6.0.2
-Toast Audio Extractor 1.1
-Toast Titanium 5.0.2
Applications on system Hard Drive I use if my wife is busy on our Windows XP machine:
-Photshop 6.0
-Microsoft Word & Excel
# of other Applications on System Hard Drive I either don't use or may be integral to the system: 260
# of Control Panels:
-Enabled: 34
-Disabled: 0
# of Extensions:
-Enabled: 174
-Disabled: 0
note: a number of the applications and extensions are for AOL, Quickbooks, Microsoft Money and the like, as well as other things I don't use (Airport, USB printers, Networking, etc.)
Smart things I did:
-Regularly made backup copies of my FCP projects to the external drives.
-Bought a copy of MacDrive so I can see what's on my External Drives on the XP machine.
-Printed out System Profile before I installed upgrades.
-Thoroughly searched this discussion board for and gathered as much info as I could before upgrading.
Dumb things I did:
-Made a copy, but not a clone, of my System Folder to one of the external drives when I first got it.
-Didn't keep any sort of separate log of what's on the External Drives.
-Never ran any sort of Disk Maintenance, even after one of the Externals crashed (DiskWarrior saved my butt on that).
-Ignored some of the advice on this discussion board.
Really dumb thing I did without even realizing it:
Captured all media for a rush job onto my internal system Hard Drive, as well as storing and using massive jpgs for the same job on that same drive...
Which led to painfully slow rendering times, and crashes caused by "Error: Out of Memory", which I interpreted as "Must buy more memory" and not "must make sure I'm not trying to edit media stored on system drive, especially with massive jpgs that I should reduce"
RECENT UPGRADES:
Here's what I did, and how I did it:
Turned off system, disconnected all External FireWire Devices, disconnected Monitor, opened case, touched various metal parts of case and power supply to discharge any Static, unplugged power cable.
-Installed 2 512MB sticks of "Lifetime" PC 133 SDRAM; total System RAM is now 1.5GB, all 3 DIMM slots now occupied.
-Installed 1 Maxtor "DiamondMax" Ultra ATA/133 100GB Hard Drive (8 MB buffer) as "Slave" (no jumper) in top of U-Carrier above System Hard Drive; attached to middle of original Apple ribbon cable, attached available power plug.
Taped spare jumper to inside of empty drive bay, noting origin and date. Did NOT push PMU button. Carefully closed case. Reconnected Monitor, did NOT reconnect any FireWire devices. Powered System on, but did NOT perform PRAM reset.
I don't remember the exact order of what happened next, but I think: System booted up normally, a window popped up saying a new drive had been found, would I like to intitialize it?, which I did as Mac OS extended, and then named. If I was instructed to restart, I did so, otherwise did not. Clicked on "about this Mac" and saw that it now showed 1.5GB RAM. I then went about moving Media/Render files off the System drive (and one of the Externals) onto the Internal Drive, with a combination of FCP's Media Manager, and dragging from the Finder. After files had copied, dragged Media/Render files from System Drive to Trash. Opened FCP project, had FCP re-link to new locations of missing files. Saved, closed, and re-opened project, set Capture/Scratch disc to new internal Drive. At some point I changed FCP's Memory Allocation from whatever it was to 512000KB Minimum, and 900000KB Prefered (and I hope I got all those zeroes right). Did NOT restart after changing Memory Allocation, unless a window popped up instructing me to do so, in which case I did. Re-opened my project, rendered a few thing at a noticeably increased speed, saved everything, emptied the Trash, shut everything down, and called it a night as it was 4:30 am.
A few hours later, I plugged the MiniDV and an External Drive into the FW ports and powered up the System. It was behaving extremely sluggishly. I would click on something, the pointer would turn into a wristwatch (sometimes with the minute-hand moving, sometimes not) and like an actual minute later, what I'd clicked on would open. All three drives were on the desktop, still had their files, and "About this Mac" still showed 1.5GB total Memory. So I powered down, disconnected the FW devices, waited a bit, and powered back up. Same sluggish response. I tried to open my FCP project file, and instead got a Window that said something to the effect of "The Application associated with this document could not be found". I think I tried to open FCP from the Applications folder on the System Drive and got the same message (I'd only had 3 hours sleep, no coffee, my client had died, and his family was coming for whatever I had in a few hours).
LAME ATTEMPTS AT PROBLEM SOLVING THAT HAVE MADE THINGS WORSE
Panic had set in, which never solves anything, so I don't remember what order I performed which tasks, between searching for clues in this forum, and convincing myself that that would be faster than trying to compose a question, waiting for a response, etc.
The first two things I did, and I can't remember which I did first (both from Keyboard Commands during Restart):
Rebuild Desktop
PRAM Reset
Neither of those solved the problem, so I continued.
I tried restarting without extensions.
I would get errors that said something like "Not Enough Memory to Open Finder".
I tried booting from Disc 1 of the Software Restore Disk, which only wanted to destroy my data.
I tried booting from the OS 10 disk, with the same result.
I was finally able to boot from the OS 9.2 Software Install Disk, and actually saw both internal drives on the desktop, and the 1.5GB RAM in About this Mac. I tried to allocate more memory to Finder, but was informed that "Cannot Perform Requested Operation. This operation requires versions above 8.0".
I think at this point I decided that I must have too many extensions, and started disabling ones I thought irrelevent to my cause (mostly anything that said "AOL", "Airport", "Ethernet", "Printer", "Modem", "Speakable", and a couple things called "Open TPT".
It gets worse. Then I decided to turn off some "unnecessary" things via the control panels, but somehow managed to disable the control panels themselves: AppleTalk, DialAssist, File Sharing, Modem, Mouse (as I saw that Microsoft Mouse was among the others), Remote Access, Speech, USB Printer Sharing, and possibly TCP/IP.
That certainly didn't help anything (though upon restarting from the OS 9.2 Disc I was able to see the extensions and control panels in their respective "Disabled" folders in the System Folder). But I still wasn't able to get more Memory to Finder.
So, I decided a few more PRAM resets might help, which succeeded in making both Internal Hard Drives disappear. I tried booting up from the DiskWarrior disc, but even the Mighty DiskWarrior couldn't find the drives. I performed the longer, in depth version of the Apple Hardware Tools tests, which reported that everything's fine (including the new RAM), but made no mention of the Hard Drives at all. The deadline having long passed, I shut the system down. I read through more posts and tech articles, etc.
I searched my External drives with MacDrive on my XP, and found the drive that has the copy of my System Folder (which shows all extensions and control panels as enabled); not sure if the Quicksilver will boot from that, I don't know what the Keyboard command for booting from a FireWire drive is (if there is one) and the drive itself only has 900MB of free space.
I can't find any reference to Internal ATA drives anywhere in the MacDrive documentation; if it was possible I'd put them into the XP, get the files off the Mac drives, reformat them and install OS9 from the Discs.
This is where I am now:
The Quick Silver is still powered down. I removed the Microsft mouse and replaced it with the OEM Apple mouse. I opened the case, and removed the PRAM/Backup battery (manufacture date: July 2001). Couldn't find my voltmeter, so took the bat to Radio Shack and bought a new one. Had the Radio Shack guy test the old one: it showed 3.69 volts still. Have not installed the new battery yet. The case is still open, waiting for any advice any of you might have to offer.
Thank you all so much for your patience in perusing and pursuing this.
Sincerely,
Patterson
Power Mac G4 Quicksilver 867 Mac OS 9.2.x 17" Studio Display, 512MB RAM

Thank you Rodney and John,
The jumpers are correct for both Maxtor Drives.
Rodney, you are correct in that the initial problem (slow rendering/"out of Memory" crashes) was caused by my not realizing I'd stupidly captured several GBs of media to my system drive, and not checking which drives those files were on (as I'd assumed I'd put them on one of my external media drives) once that problem presented itself.
Before I'd determined what I'd done, I bought the extra RAM. After I'd found the media files on the System Drive, and saw that my dedicated media drives were too full to easily move them, I decided to buy an additional Internal drive so that I could:
-Move the Media onto it relatively quickly and finish my urgent project.
-Juggle all my media into a more organized fashion for archiving (as most of my projects are on-going long-term affairs)
-Wipe it, Partition it, and clone my System Drive onto it, as a spare bootable drive in case my OEM System Drive failed.
Copying the Media files onto the New Drive and moving the System Drive's Media files into the Trash worked great: huge improvement in Rendering, etc.
Before shutting down for the night I Emptied the Trash, and was pleased with the amount of space I'd freed up on the System Drive.
My guess is that the System Drive was terribly fragmented, having been subjected to intense use over the past 5 years without any sort of Drive Maintainence, and deleting that massive amount from it in one shot caused my extreme system sluggishness upon Startup the next day.
My subsequent lame attempts to solve the sluggishnes ultimately resulted in my losing access to both drives.
Today, I replaced the Backup Battery, pushed the PMU, re-attached the AC, and Powered Up with the case open as per your suggestion.
It was trying for a few minutes (the gray screen went black at one point, and then returned to gray) before presenting me with the flashing question mark.
There was, however, a quiet but distinct "buzzing" sound that would alternate: 1 sec "buzz", one second silence, one second "buzz", one second silence, etc. coming from the drives, even after the "?" appeared.
I powered down, removed the Ribbon and Power Cables from the new "Slave" drive, and powered up again, with the exact same results.
I powered down, removed the Ribbon and Power cables from the original "Master" drive, reinstalled the Jumper on the New Drive as "Master", plugged the End of the Ribbon and the Power cables into the New "Master" drive and powered up. The screen went to the "?" within 20 seconds instead of 4+ minutes, and no more "buzzing".
I put the Apple Hardware Tools Disk in, ran the "long" test, and everything came out fine.
I have to abandon this for now, but thanks again for your previous advice, and any more you may have!
Cheers,
Patterson

My second internal hard drive disappeared

My second internal hard drive disappeared a couple of days ago taking many gigs of iTunes with it. It does not appear on the desktop, finder or anywhere else. When I click on a song in iTunes I get "The song “Cowell: Set Of Five - 4” could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?" When I try "locate," well it shows me the Main Disk. Not helpful. I've read lots of posts about vanishing drives and crashing drives on Leopard (I run Snow and was about to go to Lion). Did my drive die or did it go into the witness protection program? Irony is that I bought a 2 TB external drive last week to back up the iTunes drive and procrastinated. Suggestions? Experiences?
JCEspinosa

Is it listed in Disk Utility?

Updated to 10.4.5 and now my 2nd internal hard drive is missing...help.

I updated to 10.4.5 today with the I tunes 6.0.3. When it finished booting up my 2nd hard drive that holds all my music disappeared. I think the term is didn't mount. I am not computer savy. I have another internal hard drive that did. I used cocktail to repair permirssions and rebooted. I also, went to the apple site and downloaded 10.4.5 combo but still no luck. The hard drive does not show up in disk utilities at all. Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance....
power pc G4 Mac OS X (10.4.5) g4 12: powerbook

All I can tell you from the panic log is that there's a problem either with the video card and/or the video drivers. You might try the following:
Boot from your OS X Installer. Be sure to use the installer for the version of OS X you have installed. After the installer loads select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (or Utilities menu if using Tiger.) After DU loads select your OS X volume from the list on the left, click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer. Now shutdown the computer for a couple of minutes and then restart normally.
If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior (3.0.3 for Tiger) and/or TechTool Pro (4.1.1 for Tiger) to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.
If this doesn't help then visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on kernel panics.

Secondary internal hard drive disappeared from desktop after forced restart

I have three internal hard drives, one for system, the other two for data storage. While permorming a search on one of the data drives i clicked the "X" to the right of the spinning wheel on the bottom right of the search window to stop the search but the computer froze (wheel kept spinning). I then went through the dock and quit all applications, except for InDesign which wasn't responding to force quit.
The only way out was a force restart. Upon restart, one of the internal data hard drives did not show up on the desktop, nor after a couple more restarts, nor after restarting from the installation disk, verifying and repairing disks and permissions on the other hard drives with disk utility.
where did it go?
G4 Mac OS X (10.4.9) Dual 1.25 GHz, 2MB L3 cache each, 2GB DDR SDRAM

no it doesn't show up at all in those either.
Hmm. Then that sounds like the interface to the drive isn't even talking. You could try opening up the computer and making sure the cables are all connected firmly (of course, it should be off).
here's the log:
Nothing here looks too alarming.
Apr 21 09:51:00 Greg-Simpsons-Computer webdavd[220]:
network_mount: WebDAV protocol not supported; file:
mount.tproj/webdav_network.c; line: 2702
Apr 21 09:51:07 Greg-Simpsons-Computer webdavd[245]:
network_mount: WebDAV protocol not supported; file:
mount.tproj/webdav_network.c; line: 2702
Was your iDisk mounted at the time? Or another WebDAV server?
Apr 21 09:51:20 Greg-Simpsons-Computer
diskarbitrationd[39]: mdsyncServer [193]:28715 not
responding.
Apr 21 09:51:20 Greg-Simpsons-Computer
diskarbitrationd[39]: mds [171]:28163 not
responding.
Hmm. These are part of Spotlight, but they don't really give any clues, just that they weren't responding. Which might be because the drive disappered during your search.
Waiting for MirrorAgent to launch and respond to
CFMessagePortCreateRemote(). [186]
Again, part of iDisk.
2007-04-21 09:52:41.360 SyndicationAgent[252]
WARNING: BestCalendarDateFromString - can't
interpret: 'Sat
that last line then repeats a lot of times
Nothing to worry about. It's badly formatted date strings from some iTunes RSS feeds. They're default bookmarks in a couple of places, which is why you see them sometimes.
2007-04-21 11:13:12.192 Pro Tools M-Powered Demo[352]
CFLog (21): GetDiskFragment returns -2804 for
<Product Registration><Product
Registration><AWSCommonSymbols.dll> when trying to
load /Library/Application Support/Product
Registration.app/Contents/MacOS/Product Registration
This is ProTools trying to load a piece of code. If ProTools is working, then I'd say it's nothing to worry about. Error -2804 is "specified fragment not found", but if it handles it okay, then it could just be an informational message.
Adobe LM Service: Started
AdobeLM Service
Just the Adobe license manager telling you it started. Nothing to worry about.
Unfortunately, I don't see anything helpful here. It's just like it disappeared (or never existed) as far as the OS is concerned. If you can find your original disks that came with the computer, you could try running the hardware test and see if it kicks up any errors, either with a drive or a drive controller on the motherboard.
charlie

Time Capsule vs. 2nd internal hard drive

I have the equipment below but with only one internal hard drive. Recently my system crashed trying to upgrade TechTool (now in the landfill). Pictures and music gone. Backup! What's that? Actually they warned me but have used it for years without problems.
Now to get to my question. I have Time Capsule software (Leopard) but it sounds cheaper and easier just to slip in a 2nd hard drive and use that for backup. Is that crazy or do able? The drive I have in there is a Maxtor 6Y250M0 I think it's a 250GB. I have 164GB available but still don't have half my music and pictures on it. Any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I also have a Linksys router but my wife uses it for work and I'd be DOA if I screwed that up.
Thanks all, Crowhead

I can't recover, as far as I know, after wiping the drive and reinstalling the
system software.
Actually, with the right software, you can. There are plenty of data recovery programs out there: Data Rescue II, Norton Utilities, and Toast Titanium, just to name a few.
Even after wiping a drive, you may still be able to recover a lot of data using a good data recovery program.
A question I do have is, I'm seeing SATA I/II. Does that just mean single and dual processors?
No. SATA is what connects your internal drives. You can think of it like a modern version of SCSI, in a way.

Installing Windows 7 with boot camp as whole partition on 2nd internal hard drive

Hi all,
I am unsure what is the recent changes with Apple boot camp. But when I used boot camp utilitiy on my Mac Pro (Mid 2010) to install windows 7 64 bits. It would not install and created a whole lot of problems.
After I initialise the process to install windows 7 using boot camp utilities, I chose the option to create a single partition to installl windows 7 on my secondary internal hard drive (1TB). After I restarted my Mac Pro and started the Windows 7 installation process, I was unable to install Windows 7 on the BOOTCAMP partition created by the boot camp utilitiy. I got an error something about Windows cannot be installed on the selected forum because the driver contained GPT details.
I tried to format the BOOTCAMP partition, but it ended up with errors. I tried to delete and recreate the BOOTCAMP partition in Windows setup, but failed with errors again. As I could not go any further with the Windows 7 installation, I had to hard reset my Mac Pro and tried to reboot back into Mac OS X Lion and that's when the nightmare begin.
Not only I could not boot into OS X, I could not use any of the startup key combinations (i.e. Hold option key to select start up disk, option + R to boot the lion recovery drive, not boot from any external firewire drive installed with OS X Lion). Basically none of the key combinations worked except for the holdingi F12 and mouse key to eject CD.
The only thing I could boot the Mac Pro with is the windows installation CD and Linux Ubuntu Raring Distro. I can install the ubuntu distro without any issue. However, I could not boot my mac pro back into OS X as Linux does not support bootcamp. The only way I could use Mac OS X Lion again is to delete the partition OS X Lion was installed on, and then I was be able to install Windows 7 without any issue.
After installing windows 7 I would have to download boot camp and then use the boot camp control panel to restart in the Mac Pro installation DVD and I will have to reinstall OS X again. After installing OS X, I went to System Preference and tried to select Windows 7 as startup disc. But I failed to as it says "Windows 7" Was installed via another utility. I would have to erase the partition and reinstall Windows 7 again using bootcamp utility. If I try to install windows 7 again, the horror I described above repeats again.
From my understanding, the Boot camp utility creates a new EFI bootrom with Master Boot Record (MBR) in FAT32 format. Therefore I could not boot back into Mac OS X without using boot camp in windows 7 as none of the boot combinations key worked.
I want to ask if anyone is experiencing the same issue as i do, and if there are any solutions to the problem I am experiencing. I never had such issue before. I was able to install Windows 7 on my 2ndary internal hard drive without issue using boot camp. I don't what has changed. I have googled for solution, I only found something related to XOM but nothing else.
If anyone can provide me with any help in regards to installing Windows 7 as a whole partition on a secondary internal hard drive. It'd be grealy appreciated. Thank you in advance.

If you have driver issue, just pre-download the boot camp drivers and save them on an external drive or burn them onto a cd, you will be able to load drivers via the advanced installation option during windows setup, that is if your osx partition isn't actively preventing you from installing win7 on the BOOTCAMP Partition created by boot camp assistant, I find this rather ironic, took me 3 days to figure out this issue, I was stuck without being able to boot into anything beside the windows cd, which wasn't even helpful as I could not install windows as I did not want to delete my osx partition. I lost all my data becsuse of it, as I had no idea what was going on. I tried to recover the partition using testdisk, hfsprogs and gparted in ubuntu life cd but they dont support HFS+. As I could not access osx terminal (couldn't even boot into osx installation dvd with that dreaded MBR created by boot csmp). I could not use pdisk in terminal to restore the osx partition map. Though luck for me. Called applecare and they had no idea what the problem was, and as usual they orgsnised for hard drive replacement. But it was clearly a software issue.
They will have to fix bay2 for me as I can no longer detect any hard disk connected to that bay.

Installing Mac OS X on a 2nd internal Hard Drive

I just purchased a 2nd hard drive for my PowerMac G5 2.5 GHz machine. I want to install Mac OS X on the new drive and use it as the main drive. However, when I try booting from the Mac OS X (Black dvd disc) my machine won't boot. The screen crashes and I have to hold down the power button until the machine turns off. When I boot from my regular hard drive, I can insert the Mac OS X disc and it operates fine. It just doesn't boot my machine.
Any ideas????

Hello Again! If your goal is to use the new disk as the main disk and the current system boot drive is "stable" and is not experiencing any problems then you can clone the old drive to the new one using Kappy's process for making a bootable external since the steps are the same whether it's an internal or external drive. Be sure the drive has been formatted as Mac in disk utility and it's always good to use the zero data option when installing a new drive. Once you have cloned the drive boot from the new one and run it a few days to be sure it's working ok before erasing the old one or deleting all the files on it. You can also use SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner to clone with instead of the disk utility. Tom
Kappy's Steps to Produce a bootable clone
Prep external FW drive:
1. Open Disk Utility from the Utilities folder.
2. Select the backup or destination volume from the left side list.
3. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (journaled, if available) and click on the Erase button. This step can be skipped if the destination has already been freshly erased.
4. Click on the Restore tab in the DU main window.
5. Select the backup or destination volume from the left side list and drag it to the Destination entry field.
6. Select the startup or source volume from the left side list and drag it to the Source entry field.
7. Double-check you got it right, then click on the Restore button.
8. Select the destination drive on the Desktop and press COMMAND-I to open the Get Info window. At the bottom in the Ownership and Permissions section be sure the box labeled "Ignore Permissions on this Volume" is unchecked. Verify the settings for Ownership and Permissions as follows: Owner=system with read/write; Group=admin with read/write; Other with read-only. If they are not correct then reset them.
For added precaution you can boot into safe mode before doing the clone.
Message was edited by: Thomas Bryant

New Mac Pro - Best way to get Windows XP on 2nd Internal Hard Drive?

After 16 years, I'm back to a Mac. I picked up a second hard drive for my Mac Pro that I have not installed yet and would like to solely dedicate this drive to running XP Pro. What is the best way to do this please? Thanks!!!

Hi and welcome to Discussions and also welcome back
for running Windows XP you can use the BootCamp Assistant which is part of OSX Leopard (in the Applications/Utilities Folder).
Print out the Installation Guide found either inside the BC Assistant or from here http://www.apple.com/support/bootcamp/ and follow it to the letter.
While maybe not neccessary but advisable, make a backup of your OSX volume.
The BC Assistant gives you the choice to use a secondary harddisk fully for installing Windows (page 7 of the guide).
Make sure that during installation of Windows you re-format the destination with the Windows Installer (page 9+10 of the guide).
Also be aware that with XP you can only use the 32-bit version, since the 64-bit XP version is not supported.
Only with Vista you can use the 64-bit versions, when you have a 2008 or later model of the Mac Pro.
Once you have installed your XP, insert the OSX Leopard DVD while in Windows in order to install the BootCamp Drivers.
And download the appropriate BC Update 2.1 from here: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/windows/
Other possibilities to run Windows on a Mac are the Virtualization apps like Parallels, VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox.
http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/
http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/
http://www.virtualbox.org/
And the specialty Crossover Mac http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/
When running Windows on a Mac be sure to use a decent Anti-Virus solution.
Hope it helps
Stefan

Power mac g5 2nd internal hard drive

I just installed a second hard drive into my power mac g5. It is a SATA drive installation was easy but now the computer isn't recognizing the drive. I've tried to initialize it but i am now a bit stuck. The drive shows up when i open disk utility but i'm not even sure where to go from there. There is a Mac OS X server update combined but i cannot select a destination for the installation and now i'm pretty much just stuck, any ideas?

Hi
To format a drive, open Disk Utility, highlight the drive in the left-hand list, go to the Erase tab, choose a format (generally, Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is recommended), enter a name for the drive, and click Erase.
I'm not sure how the update is connected - you say you're running OS X Server?
Matt

2011 Mac Mini - Boot up on 2nd internal hard drive?

Hi folks,
I just picked up a Mac Mini today, after I lost all patience with my circa 2007 MacBook Pro when it stopped booting up this morning. I ordered more RAM and am planning to install the recently replaced hard drive from my MBP into my Mac Mini. I'm just wondering, will that drive just show up as another hard drive, similar to the way that external hard drives appear? And more importantly, the old hard drive has an older version of Snow Leopard installed, as well as a bunch of software, including my Adobe CS software. I've already jumped through hoops with Adobe to get my software reinstalled on my MBP a few months ago, and I don't feel like dealing with that again. So if the drive does show up as a separate device, can I just run my Adobe software from that drive? Or do I have to reboot but select that old hard drive at startup (if that's even an option) to run all software on it?
Thanks!

I mention "if SL will run" for a good reason. Newer Macs have the EFI (similar to BIOS in PC) set to usually run only the OSX it came with.
I would not bet anything on the SL installation being stable in the macmini, especially as the device drivers are for a MacbookPro (trackpad, keyboard, graphics chips, etc) instead of for a Macmini. Macmini has no built-in keyboard/mouse so has slightly more adaptable installed keyboard and mouse controllers than a macbookpro installation would.
I would not bet any money on anything other than Lion being stable on that macmini.

Internal Hard Drive disappeared

I've been using a 2TB external HD for the last 6 weeks or so as my main startup drive. When I set it up, I wiped the internal drive, reformatted it with Snow Leopard, and partitioned a Boot Camp Windows partition. I'm backing up using a 500GB backup which for now is covering me just fine. All of my drives were accessible and worked fine.
But after the last big OS X update, neither my internal drive nor my Windows drive are showing up on my desktop. I thought it might just need to be repaired so I opened Disk Utility to erase and repair the drive and reset it all up. The icon for the internal disk shows up, but it's called Media, and I've never titled that disk setup as that.
The info at the bottom of that window is as follows:
*Disk Description:* Media
*Connection Type:* SATA
*Connection Type:* Internal
*Total Capacity:* 0 Bytes
*Write Status:* Read/Write
*S.M.A.R.T Status:* Not Supported
*Partition Map Scheme:* Unformatted
Under First Aid, all of the buttons are grayed out. No Verify Disk or Repair Disk. Under Erase, none of the buttons are available. Under Partition, it won't allow me to rename the disk, and the buttons are gray. I've tried using Disk Utility from both the startup drive Apps/Utilities folder and also from starting up using the System Install CD, and the options are the same, nonexistent.
I've been using Macs for 25 years and am not new to fixing problems, but this is a first for me. It took me a long time to trust starting up from an external drive, but the 2TB lure was just too much. However, I need to know that if something happens, I still have my internal drive to fall back on. And right now, I'm freaking out a little (on the inside). Help!!

Same issue. Latest OSX: 10.8.3
Connection using firewire 800 to external sata 2tb drive (using thunderbolt dongle) - the drive suddenly appears unformatted. I connect my drive which i've been using for weeks - suddenly this: "the disc you inserted was not readable by this computer - Initilize/Ignore/Eject"
Of course I choose 'ignore'. It's happened to me 3 times now. 2 times on my brand new imac (Processor 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7) and 1 time on the same spec iMac I have at the office which was actually a 4tb sata drive.
This is the 3rd drive which is now also completely in accessable to to me. When I run any form of disc recovery, the content is there - but the MAC OS believes it's a fresh drive and will not mount it! It shows in disc utility as a blank unformatted drive.
What is going on??? I can't keep loosing my data. How can a drive suddenly loose all it's intergral data/why is this happening?I am scared to connect any of my other back up sata drives should the mac os be corrupting them in some way. This is critical.
Apple please sort this out. Is it due to firewire 800 step down using the thunderbolt dongle?
Thanks
Frustrated Apple user (again!).

Installing Windows 7 on 2nd internal hard drive using bootcamp

I'm going to remove my optical drive and replace it with a conventional HDD. What I would like to do is run Windows 7 on the HDD in optical bay and continue to run OS X on my primary SSD. Is this possible to do? I would prefer to use bootcamp but if I must use 3rd party software thats fine too.

BNuggets wrote:
How do I install BC/Windows on the HDD without removing the OD.
Option A (SSD = OSX, HDD = Windows).
Your current configuration is either
A1. OD + HDD
     Install Windows on HDD, using BCA, OD and USB.
     Move HDD to Optibay.
     Install SSD in main SATA bay and re-install/restore OSX (from TM or a cloning process).
or
A2. OD + SSD
     Replace the SSD with HDD so the HDD is the internal disk in the SATA main bay.
     Boot from SSD (in an external enclosure, if necessary).
     Install BC/Windows on HDD.
     Move HDD to Optibay.
     Put SSD back in the main SATA bay.
Option B (SSD = OSX + Windows OSes, HDD = Shared File System between the two OSes).
Your current configuration is either
B1. OD + HDD
     Replace HDD with SSD.
     Split SSD.
     Install OSX.
     Install Windows on the second partition on SSD.
     Replace OD with HDD and format it as FAT/exFAT.
or
B2. OD + SSD
     Split SSD.
     Install/Restore OSX, if necessary.
     Install Windows on the second partition on SSD.
     Replace OD with HDD and format it as FAT/exFAT.
Test Windows and OSX.

Can not shut down late 2011 MacBook Pro and turn it back on again without the hard drive disappearing?

Ok, I have searched for months for an answer to this question to no avail, probably because no one has experienced it before. I am hoping however that you guys can help me figure this one out cause it is driving me nuts! Also, I am not entirely sure what section of the support I should put this under so if I stick it in the wrong place, I apologize.
Right now my problem is very simple. When I turn off my laptop, and then try to turn it back on, my internal hard drive disappears... and I get the blinking folder with a question mark on it. I have figured out something interesting however. I have an install disk with Ubuntu Linux on it. If I boot into that first, then RESTART the laptop, not shut down and turn back on, it reads the internal hard drive just fine and I can boot as if there is nothing wrong.
Second part to the problem... If I allow the laptop in either OSX or Windows to go to sleep (aka shut off the hard drive but the computer remains on), when I attempt to wake it up, I am greeted with the usual log in screen of whichever OS I am in, but is frozen and after a few seconds goes black and restarts the computer to find that... Surprise! The hard drive is gone
I have tried every trick in the book that I can think of, but can not seem to come up with a solution to the problem... I know when the problem happened and if anyone thinks that that will help them figure this out I will type everything I did up till, including the crash that caused this, and my attempted fixes, but I have class right now so only if you guys want it I will type all that out.
What I am currently running is:
2011 MacBook Pro 13in screen
4Gb of Ram
1TB internal Hard Drive
OSX 10.11.whatever the newest update is... just updated the other day again.
Windows 8.1 on BootCamp 5 (yea I know its not supposed to work but it does) again, fully updated
Ubuntu 13.10 (I think? Doesn't really matter, its just an install disk I use to boot the computer)
If there is anything else that you guys need me to provide, I can, just simply ask. I can provide as much info as is necessary.

Sorry it took me so long to write back, But unfortunately this didn't help my issue.
My uncle and I did a lot of tests on this computer and have narrowed down the location of the problem a little bit.
We tried to first reset the SMC and the NVRAM as suggested, but the only thing that did was make the fans run on full tilt for the first session after restarting it for some reason. After that we tried re installing OSX over the OSX that was already on the system (not removing any of the files). This also didn't do anything but make refit stop working. Then we moved onto the next task at hand by removing the hard drive entirely and booting it as an external drive from one of the USB ports... as long as you booted it with the options key held down, it worked perfectly fine. Then we put an alternative hard drive into the computer and installed OSX on that. This time there was no trouble booting anything up. Everything seemed to work flawlessly. So we made a backup of my original drive (OSX, Windows, and all) onto an external hard drive and tested booting to it via USB. That again worked perfectly fine and booted right up with no problems. So after that we formatted the original hard drive and reinstated OSX. We then proceeded to transfer all the old files from the backup onto this new installation and LOW AND BEHOLD..... we were back to square one with it refusing to recognize the hard drive again.
So this basically told us that there appears to be something either wrong with the hard drive, or something got really screwed up in the software along the lines and by me copying all my old files back over, I just ended up bringing the screwed up file back over with it! (despite not copying over any settings of any kind) So I am still extremely confused as to what is going wrong... did some boot sector possibly get screwed up may be?

Internal hard drive for use as scratch disk

Am running OS 10.4.11 on a dual core 2.3 Ghz PowerPC G5. Want to install a 2nd internal hard drive for use as a scratch disk w/ FCP and for my media files, etc. Given that I can only accomodate an SATA I drive w/ 150 Gbps transfer rate what might some decent choices be for a 500 Gb to 1 TB drive suited for video (and a PowerPC G5)? I'll also be adding an external drive for backup if anyone has any suggestions.

Thanks for the recommendations. I had been looking at the Hitachi CinemaStar series but you have to reset the drive to SATA 1 for use w/ a G5 PowerMac. Resetting the drive, according to Hitachi, can only be done on a PC which I don't have access to. And I think that holds true for all their drives that are not strictly SATA 1.

2nd Internal Hard Drive Disappearing

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