• Media 100

  Installing second hard drive for dual boot

  Posted by Greg Ball on October 30, 2006 at 3:46 pm

  Okay,
  I tried to install a second sata internal drive on my Mac Quad G5 to creat a dual boot system. After restarting the mac, I did not see the second drive anywhere in disk utilities or on the desktop.

  I then removed the original hard drive that came with the Mac and put the new drive in it’s place to check if the drive and cables were working With this configuration I only get a blinking question mark. Is that because there’s nothing on the new drive so the mac doesn’t know where to go for start-up? Or is there something wrong with the new drive?

  Can someone walk me through checking if this new drive is good? Would I boot drom the OSX 10.4.8 CD? then set up the drive? Any advice would be helpful. Thanks.
  Greg

  Greg Ball replied 19 years, 6 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Lawrence Marshall

  October 30, 2006 at 6:26 pm

  If you have only the new drive in your Mac and nothing is on it, you will get the blinking question mark. Your G5 is looking for a system folder to start up with… right now your second drive is completetly blank, so your Mac has nothing to start up with.

  Who is the manufacturer of your second drive? I seem to recall that certain Seagate models will NOT work in a G5 with the internal SATA connector. I ran into your very same situation, and it was a Seagate SATA I was trying to install (the Mac wouldn’t see it, etc.). Substituted a new Hitachi drive and all was well.
• 

  Greg Ball

  October 30, 2006 at 8:35 pm

  Lawrence: “Your G5 is looking for a system folder to start up with… right now your second drive is completetly blank, so your Mac has nothing to start up with.”

  Does that mean I have to boot with the OSX disc and then install that info on the blank hard drive? It IS a segate drive, what if I put that into the first drive bay, and the drive that came with the mac and works into the seconds drive bay? Any thoughts? I’d rather not buy a new drive (again).

  Greg
• 

  Kieran Matthew

  October 30, 2006 at 11:57 pm

  Hi Greg,

  Yes, put the original HD in the second bay. If it boots sucessfully then the cabling is OK, if it doesn’t then there’s something about the connections in bay 2.

  Otherwise bung the OSX CD in and boot from that. You can then either attempt an install onto the new HD if it can see it, or you can access Disk Utility from there and see if it can see the new HD.

  K
• 

  Greg Ball

  October 31, 2006 at 1:31 am

  Thanks Kieran as usual.. I’ll give it a try.

  Greg

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