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This is an old Gigabit Ethernet model, running Tiger...
If Drive A is the only one hooked up, and it's configured as a master, the machine boots fine; it *doesn't* boot fine if Drive A is configured as cable select (gives circle/slash at startup)
If Drive B is the only one hooked up, and it's configured as a master, the machine boots fine (haven't tried it as cable select)
If both drives are connected, and Drive A is configured as master, and Drive B as slave, Drive A won't boot (circle/slash); same result if Drive A is configured as cable select and Drive B as slave. My remembrance is that for the G4's, the latter is the usual config, but the former should work fine too.
... is this an issue with the drives in question, with the G4, or some combination? TiA
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I gave Harbourmaster my old dual 500MHz GigE G4, otherwise maybe could've helped... however, during the last/most of its life here, it was run off of a PCI controller card, ultimately a Sonnett Tempo Trio, IIRC, and a couple of single purpose controller cards before that. I vaguely recall issues w/ multiple drives, prior to getting hooked on the controller cards, as being inspiration to use, and then stay with, controller cards. Primary use for last few years here was to run ginormous ADF scanner, and process scans therefrom. Nice thing about GigE was ability to use 2GB RAM in OS X. Maybe scavenge an ATA 100/133 PCI controller card; can't imagine it would be very much these days...
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On the dual 1.0 I used, setting the jumpers for CS (cable select) worked. Don't know when CS became supported on G4s however.
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Cable select for both drives. Otherwise, if you are setting master and slave, the master has to be at the end of the chain on the blue connector.
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Gigabit G4 does not support cable select, so one drive needs to be set as Master, the other as Slave. The G4 IDE ribbon is set to have either position Master the last I checked.
First G4 PowerMac to support Cable Select was the Mirror Drive Door model.
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I agree with JoeH. When I added a drive to my DA G4 years ago, I had to set the new drive to slave. The original was already set to master.
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Me three: Cable Select started with the MDD Macs. Anything earlier (with ATA) needs to be set up with drives jumpered as master and slave..
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Oh, and thinking this over a bit more, zapping the PRAM or doing a NVRAM reset might help if you still have problems after setting the drives correctly. There is no reason inherent in the G4 to boot off only from a drive set to master, my G4 boots from any drive. I do recall reports of some drive models not working on the IDE bus properly with one from another maker, but that was rare.
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Hi everyone, an update -- indeed the cable select setting did NOT work. So I'm not sure why master/slave isn't working. I've tried PRAM and NVRAM resets, hasn't helped. The only other thing that occurs to me is a firmware update... I'll check into that next.
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Well, to refresh my memory I went back and read the setup manual, http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/Powe...tSetup.PDF. According to that, the drive set to Master should be in the bottom position of the bracket and the top position gets set to Slave. The end of the ribbon cable plugs into the bottom drive and the middle connector is used for the top.
Beyond that, all I can think of is that possibly the ribbon cable is damaged, or you have run into a combination of drives that will not work together. As I mentioned before, that is rare but there were some incompatible combinations.
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