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Bigger drive in iMac

Bigger drive in iMac Hardware 7 posts Oct 27, 2008 — Oct 28, 2008
Have one of my tray-load iMacs going now and have put a 40GB drive in to replace its' old 4GB. Drive has not been partitioned.

Can't exactly boot into Mac OS :-/ - just hangs at Open Firmware.

Was reading up on Lowendmac that the main drive partition has to have a under 8GB partition - is this the case? (if it's so - ill have to set up under the Mini)

That is only the case when installing OS X. It should boot.

Are you booting from a install CD?

It should boot ok as blixanz says, the OS needs to be on the first partition of the drive which must be under 8GB or your system will become very ubnstable.

Try installing the drive and then booting from the OS CD, check the HD is ok and repair if needed, then reformat/partition if necesssary.

I've found that the very ocasional drive that will simply will not format to any Mac standars, only Windoze. If that is the case then you may need a 3rd party re-formating tool.

You might want to check the jumpers - I find that with my iMac, the HDD must be set to Master or Single drive, otherwise I can't boot from the drive.

On the tray loaders the two limitations are that the OS has to be on the first partition which is 8gb or less, the second is the mac can't recognize the full capacity of a HD if it's over 137gb.

Your talking about if he wanted to install OS X. OS 9 or 8 don't have the 8GB partition limitation.

Would be nice to run OS/X - sadly 64mb of ram won't be a pleasant experience :'( or maybe it won't install.

Got it running with the 40GB drive - its running very nicely on OS 9.2.2 (added to sig). Should have learned to be patient - had to hold down the 'C' key for a bit longer than i thought :lol:

Currently posting this on it - and I won the auction on that motherboard - i'll see how that goes - could be a simple tray swap.

mp.ls