YDL fdisk says it can't find hard drive on new dual G4

[Tim Seufert]

On Tuesday, October 15, 2002, at 12:20  PM, Grant Chesy wrote:

> This is one of the latest G4s, the one with the four cooling holes at 
> the bottom of the front, the metal drive bay covers, and that same 
> silly exposed speaker cone at the top.
>
> I think Apple crippled this hardware to hide the IDE drive so people 
> would have more trouble trying to install OS9 on the box.  The apple 
> disk partioning software w/ OS 9.2.2 can't see the drive either.  If 
> you install OSX, then do a software restore of a "special" OS 9.2.2, 
> it works fine... even if you then delete the OSX.  Even at this point, 
> a standard OS 9.2.2 CD cannot see the drive, even though you can now 
> boot directly into the restored "special" OS 9.2.2.

Nothing has been crippled.  The problem is simple: older versions of 
9.2.2 do not have a driver for the ATA100 IDE controller, which is a 
new feature not present on previous hardware.  Since your boot drive is 
connected to the ATA100 bus, naturally you are going to have problems 
when trying to use said older versions of 9.2.2.

Apple nearly always includes "special" versions of operating systems 
with new hardware, simply because they almost always need to modify 
drivers and/or add new ones.  The main difference with these machines 
is that since they've decided OS X is now the primary OS, they aren't 
including a standalone OS 9 install CD.  People who really want one can 
apparently order them for $20, though were I in that situation I'd just 
use Software Restore, tweak the resulting installation the way I liked 
it, and then use Toast to create a bootable 9 CD that can "install" via 
simple drag copy.

> Is there a similar (or completely different) workaround to get YDL 
> installed on this box?

Move your HD to the ATA66 bus.  (Old) OS 9.2.2 and YDL 2.3 can see that 
bus just fine, as it is identical to the ATA66 bus on the previous 
generation of G4s.  The rear bay with the disks mounted vertically uses 
the ATA100 bus, the front bay with the disks mounted horizontally uses 
the ATA66 bus.

P.S. fdisk is the wrong tool to use on PowerMac; use pdisk instead.  
(fdisk reads and writes MS-DOS partition tables, pdisk does the same 
for Macintosh partition tables.)