Hey everyone!

I'm a long-time Mac user that is very excited about the idea of breathing new life into his beloved PowerMac 3,5 Quicksilver by using MorphOS. I used an Amiga computer during the early 90s, so I already spotted some familiar stuff on various screenshots and videos

However, I'm running into some trouble during the installation. Whenever I boot from the burned install-disc of 3.9 that I downloaded, I only get as far as to choose a hard disk for the installation. It won't show my computer's hard disk and when I use the format utility, it won't show the disk either. For whatever reason, it is not recognized. The disc is an old 160GB IDE hard disk that has two partitions right now, one running OSX and one for MacOS9.

Any ideas as to what could be the culprit? The machine is among the supported ones on the compatibility sheet ...

Assuming the 160GB is connected to an port on the motherboard and there is nothing unusual done with the Master/Slave jumpers:

The installer and "format" only list partitions that they could actually handle.

Depending on the actual filesystems used for OSX and MacOS9 this might not be the case.


Go to "Tools" and start "HDConfig", your drive should show up here.
How to continue from here depends on wether their is free space on your HD and wether you want to keep OSX/9.

There have also have been cases where drives don't show up, often shortly before those drives failed (160GB means >10 years....).

Thanks for taking the time to answer, Kronos!

It doesn't show up in HDConfig either. Yes, it's easily more than 10 years old and could fail every day, still no signs of it yet.

What should the disk be jumpered to? Master? Slave? Cable select?

I'd actually like to format it and dedicate it completely to MorphOS ...

If the drive is the only one on the primary IDE (sits in on of the bottom bays and used the stock cable) either Master or Cableselect should work.
Chances of that helping are rather small, so....

Best route ATM would just putting in another HD (or better something flash based).

Ok, so I opened up the computer and checked on the hard disk. It's a 2012 WD Caviar Blue. Not from yesterday, but also not 10+ years. Plus these were good hard disks in my experience.

So I went ahead and jumpered the hard disk von cable select to master and rebooted. And voilá - suddenly MorphOS recognizes the drive. I formatted it and right now installation is running through.

In case somebody else runs into this kind of trouble - check your jumpers! (thanks for the help, Kronos!)

[ Edited by Chefsessel 06.01.2018 - 09:52 ]