Hey, I am facing the following issue on a PowerMac G4 Sawtooth. In the past I had a mechanical HD which needed to be retired asap, so I plugged in a Digitus ide to sata adapter with a ADATA SU630 240GB (SSD) on the free mid hd ide port , performed a backup/format the new partitions to my will, removed old hd and moved digitus/adata combo to previous ide port (removed the jumper too, so it is Master).

All went well (actually extremely well, it's blazing fast since that day!) but it's now high time I install second digitus/SSD combo 'cause I am out of space. Choose the ADATA SU630 480GB again with the same Digitus adapter, left jumpers (so it's slave) and connected to free mid hd ide port (again), powered on and I was getting a grey screen but I could observe that MorphOS was trying to boot because usb devises were flashing on/off and ctrl+a+a (reboot) worked.

I checked all possible combinations with the jumpers and ide port positions but it was a no-go, I checked the new digitus adapter (connected solely to 240GB SSD) and worked as well.

Then it flashed me: boot from CD and I saw on the Mounter that idemacio2.device isn't being detected (only idemacio.device which is the dvd). Even with only the new ADATA 480GB/Digitus combo connected it doesn't get detected.

So, before giving it another go by purchasing the very same 240GB SSD, software wise: is there any limit on the HD size (not individual partitions) that the OS can detect or could the Digitus be falling due to size of HD (480GB)? Could there be a limit of the ide powermac port too (sounds silly but idk what else to check/ask honestly)?

Any other idea on what to look for, is welcomed :)

[ Edited by Cool_amigaN 30.06.2022 - 22:28 ]

I think that HDD size is not limited. Or limit is much much bigger than 480 GB.
Limited is only partition size - according to used filesystems..

I am using 500 GB HDD on Pegasos 2 ( MorphOS+AmigaOS4) and 1TB HDD on AmigaOne X1000.Here is even article how to use 10 TB HDD on AmigaOS classic .

I have no Powermac G4, so I cannot test it. But you can try:
- check again your partition size
- use 480GB HDD + adapter only single on cable
- try HDD in other MorphOS computer
- try other IDE-SATA adapter
- try SiI 3xxx PCI SATA card

> Could there be a limit of the ide powermac port [...]?

The on-board PATA controller of PowerMac G4 up to and including Quicksilver (2001) only supports LBA28 (ATA-5), which means 128 GiB maximum for drive size. Quicksilver (2002) and later models support LBA48 (ATA-6), which means 128 PiB maximum. This doesn't seem to be the issue you're facing though, as you say your 240 GB SATA SSD works well via the adapter (which seems to remedy the LBA28 restriction), if I understand right.

Hello,

Try to plug the slave drive in the middle on the ribbon :
motherboard ------ slave ------- master

Maybe it is good idea to start in OpenFirmware and look for devices. Is new SSD visible here?
And turn on ramdebug and check it.

So, this adventure had finally come to a fruitful ending :)

First I got a smaller second ssd (110GB) and I checked all possible positions on the IDE cable (again via 2xdigitus ide-sata adapters) and jumpers (master/slave) between both and it was a no go.

Then a friend suggested to try out with a real IDE HD and has offered a 320GB WD 7200rpm. In the beginning I was getting same symptoms like the ones described earlier but I was determined to check all possible combinations again and at the last try found the only one that worked: Mechanical hd is set on Master ide position without any jumpers (thus acting as single hd), whereas my main SSD was set on slave IDE position with jumper set as salve too. Yeah, sounds like a real travesty but hey, it works :)

I am really curious though how MorphOS picks up the boot sequence... Does it scan both hds (no matter the master/slave positions and jumpers) and boots up from the first available flagged as boot partition? What happens if more than one partition is set as bootable?

Also, it was pain to fit them on the mid tower of the Sawtooth but found some nice, long sleeve ide cables from the early '00s which came in handy from my stash and moved both of the above the dvd drive bay.

Finally, as discussed on irc, MorphOS initially reported that the system was being booted by the mechanical hd, which had an old Windows 7 installation. This is due to the MBR. Once I 've deleted the partitions, selected RDB, formatted to SFS and rebooted, it reports correct boot device / partition.

[ Edited by Cool_amigaN 26.10.2022 - 16:15 ]

Boot order is determined by the BootPri assigned in HDConfig unless we are talking about where the OF loads the boot.img ( the small HFS partition).

It could also be that one drive is to slow to response and is only seen after boot already started.