Using G4 as external Hard drive for Mac Pro 3 gig? How?

donreynolds · Post by **donreynolds** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 10:57 pm

Hi guys! Glad the board is back up. Great Job James! Got a question! Is it possible to use a G4 dual 1 gig as an external Hard drive for my newly aquired Mac Pro? I have a lot of files on the G4 that I would like to access with out having to dump them on another drive. I tried to use a firewire connection and restart without success. The Mac Pro did not recognize it except as an unkown device in the system profile. Any help would be appreciated.
God bless,
Don

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 11:44 pm

Did you hold down the "T" key while booting the G4? "T" stands for "Target mode" I believe and that's what will make the computer act as if it's simply an external firewire drive. You'll know because if you have a monitor attached to the G4, you should see a screen with just a big firewire symbol appearing on it. As I recall the firewire symbol sort of moves to a different location on the screen every so often like a screensaver.

donreynolds · Post by **donreynolds** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 10:13 am

Thanks James! that worked. I appreciate your help. You are doing a tremendous job with this board.
God bless,
Don

zerosin · Post by **zerosin** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 11:26 am

I have on old G4 with a processor upgrade configured as a server. It is also a dedicated Reason machine. I put a SATA card and (2) 250GB SATA drives striped as RAID 1 with 128k block size. I use this as my storage via gigabit ethernet. Very fast!

rcannonp · Post by **rcannonp** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 1:02 pm

I have been using my MBP as my main computer and my dual 1GHz G4 for storage and batch processing. I originally tried using it over firewire, but I decided to connect over ethernet so that I wouldn't have to use up a firewire port. You can set up a TCP/IP network over ethernet or firewire and just mount the drive up when you need it. I like this instead of the target disk mode because it allows me to use the G4 when I need to.

burn em · Post by **burn em** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 4:56 am

I was thinking of doing this with an original blue and white g3 tower. (the 400 with a SCSI card)

I have 11 or so ide drives that I'm sick of pulling in and out of my 3 fw chasis. They range in size from 80 to 200 gb. (mostly 200's) If i bought a couple of ide cards i could fit 8 or maybe more dives in it.

2 questions:

1) does anyone remember if this machine has a HD size limitation? does 120 gb ring a bell? I Think I corrupted a 200 gb drive once by putting it in this g3.

2) can it restart in target disc mode (I can check this myself)