[Ham-Mac] Mac Tip of the Day (((( Use Partition rather than Erase )))

[Richard Kriss]

I will not repeat all of the problems I had interfacing a new Seagae Serial
ATA drive to this G4 AGP using OSX 10.4 and various SATA/PCI cards.  The
card that finally worked was the SIIG Serial-ATA PCI-M.  You may recall that
after I finally got the drive to mount I could NOT find it with the Apple
System Profiler. The SATA drive did not show up under ATA, Serial-ATA or
PCI.  

After all the discussion on Erase vs. Partition, I decided to wipe the new
SATA drive using the Partition option in the OSX 10.4 Disk Utility and used
Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my Primary drive to the new SATA BackUp drive.

Guess what?  The new drive now shows up in the Apple System Profiler under
ATA.  As expected it does not show up as a S-ATA drive.
------
ST380817AS:

  Capacity:    74.53 GB
  Model:    ST380817AS
  Revision:    3.42
  Serial Number:    3MR008CT
-----

As expected it does not show up under the Serial-ATA option.

The SIIG SATA PCI-M card shows up under the PCI option as
----------
2-ch SATA:
  Name:    SIIG-3512-NR3
  Type:    ata
  Bus:    PCI
  Slot:    SLOT-B
  Vendor ID:    0x1095
  Device ID:    0x3512
  Subsystem Vendor ID:    0x4895
  Subsystem ID:    0x3512
  ROM Revision:    1.0
  Revision ID:    0x0002
-----------

I am now 90% sure using the Partition option really helped.  I may never use
the Erase again.

Thanks to all that responded

Dick

ps: Yes, I can boot from the CCC cloned backup SATA drive.




Dick