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The BIG Reason

Music, opinions, and portfolio of Mark Eagleton, musician and web developer in Northern CA.

Y Entonces Había Tres

I bought a couple of drives the other day—of the super and hard varieties—for my aging Quicksilver G4 tower. They came in the mail UPS today. Pretty easy install, minus the stupid power cables of the existing drives that they seem to have welded into place for the purpose of maximizing finger pain upon removal.

Once booted, I realized that my computer, Sansuri, suffers from the classic 128GB hi-cap issue. For those of you with newer computers, that means he can only see a maximum of 128GB on a 128GB + hard drive. The new hard drive I installed was a 320GB.

I have experience with this issue as I have a Sawtooth G4 server at work that I needed to cram about 600GB of disk space into. SpeedTools makes a driver that fixes the problem. The only caveat is that if you boot from a Mac OS X volume via the old Mac without the driver installed, you can seriously wreck your data.

The three amigos and Sansuri I didn’t like the idea of not being able to boot from an OS X install DVD (Because with my brand new dual layer drive I can boot from DVDs now) to upgrade Sansuri in the future, so I went the safe rout and divided my new hard drive by three smaller ~100GB partitions. This way I can safely boot from an OS X instal DVD and not have to worry about killing any data over a 127.99GB partition. The two subsequent partitions from the first will not register at all. No I/O errors, no corrupt data.

When prompted to name these three new hard drives, I felt there was only one way I could go. I think Ivan will appreciate this part of the story.