Rebuilding and New G5's

I’ve spent much of the day fooling around with my computers. It really all started a few weeks ago when I thought I’d replace the XP computer’s 60GB boot drive with the faster 120GB data drive that wasn’t being used. I decided to do that while I had time this weekend. I used a disk utility from Western Digital to copy the boot drive’s contents over (and found a surprise in the box it was in). But, frankly, when I’ve done that in the past, I’ve still had to reinstall hardware or software to get things working again, sometimes even having to completely reinstall most of the system. I decided it just wasn’t worth the risk. After all, I still had about 15-16 GB of space left on each partition. Still, I didn’t like the idea of that 120GB hard drive going largely unused.

I usually know each and every spare piece of hardware and software I have in the house. But I apparently had forgotten that an 80GB Hitachi hard drive that had originally come in my MDD Power Mac was stored in a box, replaced by a faster 120. It happened to be the box that held the WD disk utility I needed to perform the copy operation. I had one more hard drive in the house than I thought. What was I going to do with it? How could I optimize my use of all of them?

I had two hard drives in Firewire cases I used for backup. I knew the one I used for backing up the data on my Power Mac held 80GB, but all I could remember about the one I used to backup my Windows machine was that it held everything with some room to spare. Since I already had two copies of the data (between my Quicksilver Power Mac and its Firewire backup hard disk), I could afford to sacrifice the Firewire hard disk used to backup the Windows machine. I decided that the best use of the 120GB hard drive would be if I put it in my MDD Power Mac to become another scratch and storage disk for use with Final Cut Pro. And since the MDD Power Mac could hold four hard disks but only had two mounted in it, I could also mount the 80GB Hitachi in it. The Firewire hard disk I backed up the Windows machine with (using direct copy techniques) would become the data disk (i.e., the D drive in the machine). I wouldn’t have to do anything but mount it since the data was already there.

To make a long story short, my Windows machine is running a 60GB Maxtor boot drive (FAT32 and NTFS partitions) and an 80GB Seagate data drive using FAT 32 (at least for now---I may divvy it up into a FAT32/NTFS volume later). My MDD Power Mac now has a 160GB Maxtor hard drive (boot volume), 120GB Hard Drive 2, 120GB Hard drive 3, and an 80GB Hard Drive 4. That gives me plenty of space to work with lots of digital video and even some room to archive a few projects I know I’m going to keep.

During all the swapping and checking of jumper settings, I discovered I didn’t have the two disks on the primary IDE cable of my MDD Power Mac set correctly. I had set them up as a Master/Slave pair. While that is correct for my Quicksilver, it is not correct for the MDD Power Macs. The MDD Power Mac needs its hard disks set to Cable Select. I corrected that. I was hoping that mis-setting might explain the kernel panics I had gotten running Norton Speed Disk and Micromat’s Drive 10 Optimizer from their respective CD’s, but it seems to have had little impact. Drive 10 crashed as it always did on that machine just as it was reporting “Finishing”. As I wrote this, Norton Speed Disk was crunching away on the hard disk. I’m waiting to see if it crashes, too, or runs successfully.

NOTE: It crashed, halfway through like it always does. I’m booting off the Software Restore DVD that came with the MDD and using its Disk Utility to check the disk and repair permissions on the boot volume. I’ll see if that helps.

Regardless, tomorrow will be fun. I’m off work tomorrow, so my wife and I are driving up to the Apple store to photograph, video, and play with a couple of G5’s. They say they have both 1.6 and 1.8Ghz machines. I might even try to smuggle in Cinebench and PSBench7 on a CD...!