Advice requested, please

[kbeartx]

....short of opening it up and looking at it, that is....

My situation is this:

My formerly trustworthy G4 MDD has died.  I suspect the power supply, since no lights or sounds or any activity at all is evident when the power button is pressed and the PMU reset had no effect whatsoever.  There are four IDE drives installed inside this Mac and altogether they total about 750 GBs.  While not overfull, there is a LOT of data on these drives I'd prefer not to lose forever.

I have a LaCie external drive* [as far as I can determine it's a model d2 Quadra 500GB] shown here: http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11156, but nothing I find on their site or in the d/l-able documents they provide contains the answer to my question about what kind of drive is inside the enclosure.  Note that this enclosure has external connections for USB, Firewire, and eSATA, but I'm not concerned with those options at this point [FWIW, it's currently connected to the G5 via USB-2 through a powered hub and works just fine].

Another wrinkle is that my Number One Son has just gifted me with his 'old ' peasea for Father's Day, since he recently assembled a new one for his own use, and he's requested a HD from me so that he can complete the setup of this machine for me  [loading the OS, etc.] cuz he transferred the HD from the old machine to his new one.

I'd like to remove one of the drives from the MDD for this porpoise, but I want peruse what's on each of the drives before I do so, and I was hoping to use the external to fire up the drives one-by-one and have a look-see, and if need be, copy some data to my G5's HDs before I convey it to my NOS for installation into the peasea.  I do not have an IDE controller in my G5, it's SATA-only, with two drives: the original 150 GB and a 750 GB I added.

I used to have an external USB-only enclosure I used for similar porpoises in the past and it was quite easy to open and swap IDE drives out of and into this box.

Has anybunny had the occasion to open and swap drives in a similar LaCie enclosure?

Is there any way I can determine [such as by 'reading' the cryptic data supplied in the More Info Hardware section of About this Mac] what kind of drive this enclosure supports?

Perhaps some other utility SW can 'tell' me what I want to know?

One option I contemplate is emailing LaCie's support staff; thot I'd ask here first...

TIA,

Kb

*Many, Many Thanks, Mama Moose!

PS- reason why I'm not pursuing the Fixing of the MDD are:  the only use it's had for the last year or two are as a second comp for my roommate to use so that we can play World of Warcraft together, but it cannot run the newer 'expansions' to the game and still would not even if I fixed it.  And the peasea will most definitely run the WoW expansion paks [as will the G5], b/c my son had been running them on it until he put together his new one.

[Jack W]

kb,

if all else fails, here's a USB adapter that you can hook up to the bare drives, and see the contents on your desktop.

I've got one, and it works just fine with ATA, SATA, and about any current or recent drives.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Tec...ogy/U2NV2SPATA/

only 29 bucks

- jack

[Paddy]

Kenny, if the Lacie drive you have is eSATA as per LaCie's web site, you can be sure that it's NOT IDE inside!! It will be an SATA drive. You can't get eSATA speeds out of an IDE drive. And absolutely no recent external drives are going to be IDE inside either - they're only made by Western Digital these days and they've become legacy items as all new computers have SATA. IDE drives are typically more expensive per gigabyte now too...and of course, they top out at 500GB.

So, you've two options - either get an IDE enclosure or two so that you can actually use those internal drives going forward, or use the adapter as per Jack's suggestion, recognizing that it's only a temporary solution - the drives aren't protected, so it's something you'd only want to use to transfer the info to a new SATA drive.

Enclosures for IDE drives are also becoming scarce, but are still available. NewEgg still has some 22 of them (some just color variations!)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList....30&name=IDE

(They list 91 SATA enclosures, by comparison)

[chriskleeman]

Hi Kenny,

In case you'd like to resurrect that MDD: MDD Power Supply

Not entirely sure which one (there are two listed) for your machine, but they were very helpful in the past, having repaired the power supply in my MDD twice, once under warranty. Unfortunately, something else in my MDD has made it work intermittently, even though I've replaced both the power supply and the power switch.

Here's a link to some info that was posted here at TS when my my Dual MDD died: MDD Power Supply Info

These days you could probably come up with a working Digital Audio or Quicksilver to house all those drives pretty cheap on eBay. Took a quick look, there's a  DA or Quicksilver 733 available for $100 including shipping or BO.

HTH,

Chris