Problem with a new hard disk

Question

I have an old Imac 333, but unfortunately the original hard disk is died, so I munt a normal ide hard disk (segate 20G), but my mac don't see it, WhY? please help me!!

Answer 1

First, you have to make sure the drive is set to Master, not Cable Select or other setting. The "tray-loader" iMac actually has two IDE buses and the CDROM drive is on the other IDE bus. Some drives distinguish between settings for Master with no Slave present and Master with Slave. You want Master with no Slave present. These settings are made using the sets of pins on the drive, with little jumpers. There should be a label the drive with the settings. If not, the manufacturers web site should have it settings.
If that's been done, the second problem may be that the drive is not formatted, or it is formatted for Windows. I can't tell if you are using Mac OS X or Mac OS 9. If X, start up from the Mac OS X Installation Disk and run Disk Utility from the Installer menu. If Mac OS 9, start up from the Mac OS 9 Installation CD and run Drive Setup, with should be in the Utilities folder. In both cases, use the utility to format the drive for Mac OS Extended (HFS+).
Finally, these iMacs (233 MHz to 333 MHz) have a hardware limitation that requires the start up drive or volume fit within the first 8GB of drive space. So if the drive is 20GB, you must partition it so that the first partition is about 7.7GB and the second partition is the remaining space. This limitation exists only during the startup process. Once booted, you have full access to the second partition (up to a total of 128GB for all partitions).