EliSko
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PB 12" Al won't read internal disks - 2009/04/19 16:15
My troubles began when I tried to upgrade a 12" Al PowerBook (G4/867 MHz) from Panther (10.3) to Tiger (10.4). While backing up files I did a copy the wrong way and overwrote some important data. Since I had to pull the disk anyway for someone to try running a data recovery program on it, I decided to upgrade the original 60 GB hard disk (a Fujitsu MHS2060AT) to something faster and (hopefully) larger.
It seems that 7200 RPM laptop drives are no longer sold with PATA (IDE) interfaces, only with SATA. I found one vendor that offered to pull a drive from an old computer and refurb it for me, but I decided that going from 4200 RPM to 5400 RPM would be all the improvement I could afford.
When I first put in the 160 GB Western Digital 160BEVE and booted up the Tiger installer, the Disk Utility told me that the new drive was 4.0 PB - PetaBytes! It offered to let me create TeraByte sized partitions....
Guessing that the old installer disk wasn't recognizing the drive signature, I pulled the new drive and plugged it into another (10.4) machine, which recognized it correctly, and formatted it. But when I transferred it back into the laptop, I was again told that it was a monster petabyte drive.
Even though a discussion about the 128 GB limit said that PowerBook G4s were new enough to avoid the problem, I followed the instructions at InTech's ATA Hi-capacity Driver page http://www.speedtools2.com/ATA6.html and created a blank partition over the 128 GB threshold - I used two partitions up to 127.5 GB, a blank, and then a fourth partition for all the spare space from 128.5GB on up. (I like creating a second small boot partition so that I can run Disk Utility and repair the main disk without needing to boot from optical media.)
Hooray! :) The PowerBook correctly identified the 160 GB drive. But ... it showed no partition table. Boo! :( I tried reconfiguring the partition table on the laptop with the installer's Disk Utility, but I got an I/O error message when I clicked the Partition button.
After many phone calls, running around, and a deal of hassle, I finally scrounged up a new 120 GB Hitachi Travelstar 5K160 (model HTS541612J9AT00 - sounds like a serial number, eh?) This drive should not suffer from the >128GB limits, and still would give me a 5400 RPM performance boost with nearly double the storage. (Plus average seek time goes down from 7.1 ms to 5 ms - another performance win.) So one more time I opened up the PowerBook, switched out the 160 GB drive, put in the 120 GB drive, and closed it up again. (By this time, I was no longer putting in any screws, just clicking the case.)
It worked - the Installer immediately recognized the 120 GB drive (well, the second time, after I reseated the cable...) - but then it didn't work any better. Again I was unable to read or modify the partition map. Again I got the I/O errors.
Beginning to smell a rat, I got out the original 60 GB drive which still had not been re-formatted, and plugged it back in. You probably won't be surprised to learn that even when I restarted with the original drive, the PowerBook no longer recognized the partition table that it had been using before the upgrade started.
So what can cause a PowerBook G4 and Open Firmware version 4.5.5f4 to be unable to read or write the partition table on the internal drive? And how do I fix it?
TIA,
- Eli
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