Strange behavior

[EdCastillo]

My G4(saw)/400MHz/256MB/10GB UATA was running great with PTLE/001. Then I added a 7200 rpm
UATA as a slave. Now, after an hour or so of tracking, the system slows to a crawl, or freezes (with 6008 errors and the like).

--you know...a lot of finger taping by the virtual hand...even when just trying to playback--

This happens even when I use my system disk (7200 rpm, as well), which never happened before.

Any thoughts? Any suggestions for diagnosing the problem? (I've defraged, messed with memory allocations, etc...no luck)

Thanks! You guys are great.

[EdCastillo]

No 'disk' jockeys out there with a word or two of advice?

[lwilliam]

Mr. dcornutt seems to be the resident Mac expert here. Maybe he will post.

Obviously, if it was working before you put the drive in, then there is something wrong with the way you have it installed. Have you double-checked the jumper settings?

------------------
LW

[parker9]

Is your new second drive by any chance a Maxtor?

I had a great deal of difficulty getting my G4 (Sawtooth) to recognize and work well with a Maxtor as the second drive. This was strange since the 10 gig main drive is a Maxtor.

I switched to a Western Digital as the second drive and now all is well.

Good luck

[EdCastillo]

Yes, Parker9, it's a Maxtor!

Please tell me about your experience returning the goods.

Thanks,

EC

[parker9]

Well, actually I didn't return the Maxtor (it's a 40 gig). I put it on a Sonnet Tempo Ultra ATA66 card (a daul channel IDE card that fits in a PCI slot for about $99) and it's worked great there.

For what it's worth the Maxtor also didn't work on the other IDE cable either. (There's a second plug right under the DVD drive for zips etc.)

I've heard that it has to do with Maxtor ROMs.

If I find more details, I'll post them.

Good luck

[parker9]

Something else to try...

From the Maxtor site:

"When formatting the IDE internal hard disk, be sure to use either Apple's Internal HD Format or Drive Setup programs."

-------

If didn't choose LOW LEVEL FORMAT from the FUNCTIONS>INITIALIZATION OPTIONS in the Drive Setup Program you might try that. I couldn't format/initialize my Maxtor because I had data on the disk that I couldn't afford to erase. Maxtor seems to me to be saying that it might be a good idea to do a low level format for good performance on an Apple computer. These drives come formatted for Windows computers.

And, yes, I am absolutley guessing now...

[EdCastillo]

Thanks Parker9...helpful stuff.

[esymons]

I have a Maxtor 30 gig and another Maxtor 27 gig in my G4 - no problems so far....

Evan
www.stepandahalf.com

[onemanband]

My second drive is a Maxtor too. It was all new to me so I read everything in apple help and used drive setup. No problems.I don't recall having to do a low level reformat though. If you used another utility to format the first time why not just go through the normal process with drive setup after double checking jumpers and power connection. good luck.

Bob