MDD G4 : Pull apart & Assembly instructions needed.

[Aquafire]

For some darned reason, my beloved MDD 1.25 G4 is acting up.

I have run a series of tests and so far the ram has checked out a OK.

I have pulled the SCSi Card, and the extra USB's in the expansion slot.

The OS disks have all checked out as well.

They boot on all my other macs, yet the MDD stubbornly refuses to start up from them.

It either spits them out, saying they are unreadable or the MDD throws up a grey screen with a circle and line through it.

Having looked at the innards more critically, I am beginning to suspect that the two drives may have been installed incorrectly.

On a PC, the normal procedure is to install two HDD's off of the one cable and connect them to one of two (side by side) Motherboard socket cable connection points. The 'end of the cable' HDD is usually set up as a 'master' with the middle plugged HDD being set up as a 'slave'.

But on this MDD, it looks as though the two drives have been set up on separate cables and connected to the board at two different points.

As far as I can tell, they are not connected via a common cable..which is what I would expect as per a PC set up.

So, does anyone have access to a MDD layout-specs sheets etc that show how to systematically pull an MDD apart, as well as how to set up the two drives properly, so that they are working together instead of against each other...?

I assume there are detailed Mac Upgrade, Installation and Repair pages out there, but so far I have been out of luck..

Thanks in advance...

Aqua
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Of the four X systems in the world.

Which would you choose?

OS X : LinuX : UniX or MS-BolloX.

[JohnnyBoy]

Hi there Aqua,

- Go to this page: http://eshop.macsales.com/tech_center/installation.cfm
- Click on the "Hard Drive" tab about 2/3 of the way down the page
- Identify whether you've got an MDD with an ATA66 or ATA133 connection
- They've even re-sized the vids for different bandwidth connections

In my own experience, I used to put the optical drive on a different IDE cable from the HDs because of the different transfer rates/IDE protocols between the two types of devices.

John.
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[Aquafire]

Thanks JB.

Do you know if Apple has service /repair / instruction layouts on their site..?

It would be great to download them as PDf's and print them off, so that they are at hand..

Cheers

Aqua
_________________
Of the four X systems in the world.

Which would you choose?

OS X : LinuX : UniX or MS-BolloX.

[JohnnyBoy]

This is as close is I can find, Aqua. But it's not a PDF
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1815

(Maybe under the "Print..." menu option, you could "Save as PDF"?)
_________________
Intel Mini 2.0GHz C2D (4GB/120GB/SuperDrive/10.5.8 ), 120GB WD Passport, Logitech ergo k/b
iPod Touch (32GB, 3rd gen), iPod Shuffle (512MB, 1st gen)

[JohnnyBoy]

Here we go! Have a look at this: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=50018
_________________
Intel Mini 2.0GHz C2D (4GB/120GB/SuperDrive/10.5.8 ), 120GB WD Passport, Logitech ergo k/b
iPod Touch (32GB, 3rd gen), iPod Shuffle (512MB, 1st gen)

[Aquafire]

[miniconvert]

Not sure where you're at with this but your original post doesn't make sense to me. Part of it seems to read that you can't get it to read a CD/DVD, but you're talking about a pair of hard drives.

I'm going to go with the issue being a pair of drives.

The way you describe the drives is actually correct. There is no reason you can't have two drives set as master and connected to the primary and secondary IDE ports on the motherboard. In fact, you will get getter performance from this setup in most cases.
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Intel Mac Mini, 1.83 C2D 2.5GB, 80GB, Combo Drive
Graphite G3 iMac DV SE, 400Mhz, 512MB, 30GB
iPod Touch (1st Gen)

[hackersmovie]

I have to agree with miniconvert. Your Mac shouldn't really care what IDE buss the drives are on. I have an old G3 with an optical drive and hard drive connected to one IDE buss and two hard drives connected to the other. The real magic in this set up is I have all 3 drives set up in a JBOD RAID and am booting from it!

Did you try booting it with just one drive? Then maybe the other? You know the old "process of elimination" routine.
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[Aquafire]

[hackersmovie]

Ahh... reading OSX discs! Well, as it turns out, not all DVD drives are OSX "bootable" compatible. That's most likely your issue. You'll need a new optical drive, most likely.
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