Power Mac G4 Hard Drive

krisg · Oct 10th, 2009, 02:20 PM

Hi! I hope someone can help an apple challenged newbie - I have just received a Power Mac G4 (AGP Graphics) but alas it has no hard drive - could someone advise me on what I kind I need to buy to get this working?

Thanks!

CanadaRAM · Oct 10th, 2009, 02:38 PM

You need a 3.5" IDE (Parallel ATA) drive in this machine

IIRC the G4 models prior to the Quicksilver 2002 model have a restriction on the largest capacity of drive the disk controller can handle, 128 GB

Here's a list of G4s and their specifications
Apple Power Mac G4 Specs (All Power Macintosh G4 Technical Specs) @ EveryMac.com

There is no restriction on capacity of a Firewire hard drive, only drives that are directly connected to the logic board by IDE

You'll also need the install disks for the machine with the operating system - first to boot the machine so you can format the hard drive to Mac HFS+, then to install the Mac OS.

krisg · Oct 10th, 2009, 02:42 PM

Hi CanadaRAM,

thank you for the quick reply, that was very helpful - I have leopard which I was going to install, now I will hurry off to buy a hard drive - thanks again and Happy Thanksgiving!

Kris

krs · Oct 10th, 2009, 03:38 PM

Kris -
Exactly which G4 do you have?
Leopard is only officially supported by Apple if the processor is around 800 MHz (can't recall the exact number) or faster.
For G4s with slower processors there is some workaround required to get Leopard to install.

reddrag0n · Oct 10th, 2009, 06:11 PM

The hard drives you can use are as follows. an 3.5" IDE hard drive less that 128 GB on the internal IDE connector. If you purchase either an IDE or SATA card then you can use IDE and SATA drives larger than 128 GB. As for your processor, if you wish to install Leopard, you need at least a minimum of a G4 867 MHz.