Best ways to use new hard drives?

Question

I got some really useful answers on this forum when I was trying to recover from a hard disk crash. Thanks to all who helped. Now, I have a few more questions.
On the recommendation of the service technician at the Apple
store, I went on line and bought a Seagate 250 GB
internal drive, and installed it in my G4, only to
discover that it can only recognize 128 GB. Oh, well, it was pretty cheap.
Once I got the system rebuilt and running OK, I went
to work on the CD burner. It turned out to be broken,
and the manufacturer, La Cie, recommended I just
purchase an internal CD/DVD burner, and install it in
the old case. After thinking about that for awhile, I
thought, why don't I just buy another internal hard
drive, and install that in the CD case? that way ,
I'd have an external firewire drive to use for backup, instead of burning CDs. which is a pain. So, I found a 160 GB Seagate drive, even
cheaper than the 250, and bought that. I should have
checked to see whether the old hard drive would fit in
the CD case, but, of course, I didn't. Turns out the
3.5 inch internal hard drive is much smaller than the
CD drive, I think the electronics would work OK, but
I don't have a good way to secure the disk drive in
the larger case. So, now I have 2 internal hard
drives in my Mac, one a 250 GB which my Mac thinks is
128 GB, and the other a 160 GB, which the Mac also
thinks is 128 GB!
My questions:
1. Would the electronics in the CD/DVD case work with the ATA drive?
2. Anyone know of a good work-around to secure the drive in the larger case?
3. If I keep both drives in the Mac. Can I make the slave drive bootable? How?
4. If I should get a good answer to #1 and #2, or choose to buy a new hard drive enclosure, how do I go about cloning the contents of the master drive to the slave, so that I can use the larger drive as my external drive without having to repeat the painful process of building my system from scratch?
5. I think I remember seeing reference to a software solution to the 128 GB limit. Is that correct? What are the drawbacks? do I have to reformat the drives?
Thanks.
Powermac G4   Mac OS X (10.3.9)   1.4 GHz, 896MB SDRam

Answer 1

Hi, Dave!
I don't know for sure whether the drive will work in the FW case that held the optival drive. Why don't you temporarily connect it and check?
If you install the drive internally and put an operating system on it, it will boot regardless of whether it's configured as Master or as Slave. You could have an operating system on both drives if you cared to. You'd be able to boot from either of them (which is determined by - and may be changed in - the Startup Disk pane of System Preferences from a booted system, the menubar of the install disk, or the Startup Manager (invoked when the option key is held down at startup).
You can use the Restore option in Disk Utility to clone your startup volume to a volume on another drive. Better yet, try SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner, which are faster. Cloning will make a bootable duplicate of the startup volume you can use just like the original, without having to reinstall anything.
The software solution you're referring to is Intech's ATA Hi-Cap Support Driver. Read the info at the site; there are some restrictions on how you need to set up the drives for it to work properly. If you instead buy an ATA-133 PCI controller card ($60-$80), you won't have the restrictions and will have a faster drive bus to operate with, taking advantage of the speed of the ATA-100 or ATA-133 drives you have, while allowing you to use the native logic board bus to add an additional (<120GB) drive.
In any event, in order to realize the full capacity of the drives, you'll need to reformat them from the 128GB they're currently formatted to.
Gary