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ATA Bus oddities...


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billybobsky
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Inner Swabia. If you have to ask twice, don't.
 
2007-12-29, 02:52

This is what I get for trying to make my life better by increasing the number of harddrives in my powerbook g4 (17", 10.5.1). I installed MCE's optibay HDD into my computer and found it unbootable after installation.

Amazingly enough I wasn't panicking, and good thing too because there was no reason to do so, my computer boots perfectly fine when the optibay hdd is disconnected.

Ok. I start to think I have toasted my ata bus somehow and decide to test this hypothesis by reverting my computer to normal, attempt to install os x on my optibay hdd in an external firewire enclosure and go from there....

OS X installation works fine, the optibay hdd is bootable and fast (comparatively).

Right... back into the powerbook it goes, boot up to a virtual brick. No system folder found (again).

WTF? I disconnect my computer's standard HDD expect full well that it won't boot. Nah. It boots fine, I am staring at an empty leopard installation as I write.

So WTF? Why can't my ata bus handle 2 hdds? It handles a superdrive and an hdd, it handles the hdds separately fine... what the hell is going on?

anyone?

btw -- mac os x cd does not see any devices on ata bus when both drives are attached...

(is it possible that this is a strange master/slave problem... hmmm...)
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billybobsky
BANNED
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Inner Swabia. If you have to ask twice, don't.
 
2007-12-29, 16:05

hmm... still haven't figure it out... does anybody know how apple deals with master/slave in the powerbook series?
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billybobsky
BANNED
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Inner Swabia. If you have to ask twice, don't.
 
2007-12-29, 17:33

Figured it out...

For some reason, I needed to force the optibay hdd to be in slave mode even though it isn't on the same ata cable... two master hdds confuse os x?

who knew?

b
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ShadowOfGed
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Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Earthsea
 
2007-12-29, 18:24

Each ATA cable supports having two drives; a master and a slave. It's not OS X that's getting confused, it's at a lower level than that. The hardware/BIOS/EFI will get confused if you plug two master drives into the same ATA channel, thus making it impossible for *any* operating system to use the drives.

Apparently I call the cops when I see people litter.
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