Mac Not Seeing PATA Hard Drive

[Project 2501]

Well, I swapped out the cable for one that I know works. However, I discovered that there is something flaky about BIOS detecting the drive. It doesn't always detect it... sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't even if I don't change any settings. I'm not sure if it is the motherboard or the drive.

Does anybody know if a PCI IDE card will work (Sonnet Tech)? My retired Mac has a PCI card for IDE drives. I got it to get around the capacity limits of the built-in Apple IDE controller.

BTW, I finally retired my old mac! This is my first message written with the Hackintosh. It is much quieter and cooler than the Quicksilver Mac. Since it is such a big leap, even Photoshop CS running under Rosetta seems faster.

 

[flatfoot]

I'd give the PCI card a try.

 

[Lnx2Mac]

However, I discovered that there is something flaky about BIOS detecting the drive. It doesn't always detect it... sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't even if I don't change any settings. I'm not sure if it is the motherboard or the drive.

Go to the 'Advanced BIOS Features' page of your BIOS.
There, you will find 'Delay for HDD (Secs)'...

It might help giving it a couple of seconds, to allow the drive to spin-up before the BIOS tries to detect it...

Hope this helps !
Lnx2Mac

 

[tonymacx86]

One more thing to try- if you can get the drive hooked up to a Windows or Linux install, repartition to either GUID/Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) or MBR/FAT32 so that OS X will recognize it correctly. Some partition managers and formats don't play nice with OS X, especially with IDE. I've had luck with some drives and not others- seems IDE support with OS X on these boards is a bit unpredictable.

Hope this helps.

 

[Project 2501]

Well, I'm going to put this problem on the back burner for now since I got more than enough capacity. I'm going to concentrate on putting the finishing touches on the Mac, and then move on to installing Windows 7 on the second hard disc.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'll report back when I try to tackle this again.

 

[Project 2501]

Just a minor update...

The BIOS now can see the drive reliably. I originally had a 5 second delay for HD spin up, but it was just a little too short, causing the intermittent detection. All I had to do was to increase it to 6 seconds. At least I know that the motherboard is okay.

However, I still can't detect the drive in Disk Utility or System Profiler. The drive is in 'cable select' mode and plugged into the 'master' plug of the cable.

My friend recommended Parted Magic to reformat the drive. I'll give it a try; not sure if it does GPT.

 

[Project 2501]

Here's another update on the problem...

I used Parted Magic 4.1 to reformat the IDE drive to GPT/HFS+. Mac still can't find the drive with System Profiler or Disk Utility.

I got around to installing Windows 7 on my second hard disc drive. Works fine so far and the IDE drive shows up in Windows, so I know that the motherboard and drive are working properly. The Mac can mount the NTFS and FAT32 partitions of the SATA drive.

I tried another Jmicron IDE driver from kexts.com, but that didn't work either.

I'm fresh out of ideas... anybody know what I might be missing?

My last option is to pull the PCI card from the retired Mac and hope it works.