Leopard sees 250Gb ATA slave drive as 128Gb...

Question

I have a 2001 QuickSilver 800Mhz DP tower, now upgraded to 1.8 Ghz DP (Newer Technology G4 7448 PPC). Also running an accelerated GeForce 7800XT 256Mb graphics card. Internally, I have 2 SCSI drives (70Gb and 140Gb) and 2 ATA drives (120Gb master and 250Gb slave). Contrary to popular belief, this version of the 2001 QuickSilver supports drives bigger than 128Gb without any third-party tweak...
Under Tiger, all the drives have performed as they should and have all been fully accessible. SMART status of the ATA drives shows these to be healthy and I regularly do the usual good housekeeping to maintain the drives' software health.
Loaded Leopard onto the master SCSI drive OK. However, on checking Leopard Disk Utility, I found that the 250Gb appeared as 128Gb. Mistakenly tried fixing this error using Disk Utility. Failed (of course) with B-Tree errors and an unable to proceed warning. Booted up in Tiger from one of the other drives and recovered all the data off the 250Gb ATA drive. Then reformatted this... Booted back into Leopard and... appears on the desktop as 250Gb but still looks to be 128Gb in Disk Utility. Called Apple who had me boot up from the Leopard DVD and use Disk Utility from there - same problem... They have concluded that there is something awry with Leopard.
I have found the following: if I keep the contents of the 250Gb drive down to less that 128Gb all in the first 128Gb of the drive, I can see this as a 250Gb drive in Finder and can work with it (so long as I do not use Disk Utility or any other software that gets its disk information from Leopard, e.g. iPartition 3.0). If, however, I step outside this - e.g. load on more than 128Gb - though I can still see the disk in Finder as 250Gb, if I try to open this, Finder closes...
Anyone got any ideas, similar experiences etc? Apple have thanked me for pointing this out, but I suspect that it is not going to be high on their agenda unless the volume of complaints is there...

Answer 1

From my own experience the Finder in Leopard tells me that it cannot verify the bigger partition of two partitions of my 200+ GB HD _but will mount it on the desktop_. I didn't do much poking around to avoid corruption. I did an uninstall of Intech's Hi-Cap and restarted just to be sure. Yep, still there. The odd thing is _the disk was formated under Tiger_ quite a while ago. Sure seems that HD capacity for certain G4s is inconsistent.
The following came from a discussion on Low End Mac. I believe "Dan" is Dan Knight, the publisher of Low End Mac.
+*Big Drives in My Digital Audio - Am I Crazy?*+
+From Dylan Ruark:+
+Hello Dan,+
+First, thank you for providing such a valuable resource. Yours is the go-to site for Mac info and links, in my opinion.+
+Now to my problem. It's not really a problem; it's just a mystery. I have a Digital Audio G4, upgraded with a dual G4 from PowerLogix, the 7448 at 1.8 GHz. I also had a SATA controller in this machine to get around the drive size limitation, a SIIG 4-port bought from OWC. After playing around with Leopard (which installed without complaint, by the way), I decided to revert to Tiger as it just seemed to run better, plus I rather like my iSub.+
+During all of this messing around with booting and rebooting, I kept getting hitches and gray screens and freezes, so I decided to figure out just what it was, which meant pulling everything I'd added, when possible, to try to find the culprit. Unfortunately, I no longer have any small PATA drives, so I put in a 180 GB drive, knowing that it would register as only 128 GB, but that's fine; I just wanted to eliminate the SATA card as the problem. This drive was connected to the stock IDE controller.+
+After formatting it with Drive Utility, lo and behold, it shows 172 GB available. What? So, I installed Tiger on that disk and rebooted from it, thinking I must be imagining things, but sure enough, it's still there. In fact, I have two 180 GB drives hooked up to that controller, and they're both showing their full capacity. What's going on?+
+I'm not complaining, mind you, but it's a bit odd. I even checked the serial number as displayed in System Profiler against that website that has the serial number database, and it's confirmed as a Digital Audio. Am I nuts, or is something else going on? Perhaps the firmware update that was required for the 7448 did it? Have you ever heard of this?+
+If you like, I can send screen shots; I don't want to presume by sending large files...+
+Thanks for any insight,+
Dylan
Dylan,
+I don't have an answer for you, but I can speculate. I know that several Power Macs support large drives on a second IDE bus, but according to everything I've read, they can't see more than 128 GB on the "hard drive" bus without special drivers. My guess is that either a firmware update added big drive support or Apple has revised Disk Utility to add that capability. I've received one other email from a Leopard user who had no problem mounting his big drive even though the third-party driver he had isn't compatible with Leopard.+
+Kudos to the engineers at Apple if they've come up with a fix for this, as it will be one more reason to consider running Leopard on older Macs.+
Dan
Dan,
+Thanks for the response. Glad to hear I'm not alone. I hadn't considered the possibility that it might have something to do with installing Leopard. Just to be clear, I am now running 10.4.10 on this machine; Leopard was a bit slow on this machine (lightning fast on the Core2 Duo iMac), and I don't want to give up the iSub just yet. But it's definitely nice to be able to use all the space.+
+Thanks again,+
Dylan