Using >128GB EIDE with older G4: can it work at all?

[Rich Rostrom]

I installed a 160GB EIDE drive (WD 1600JBRTL) in my 450MHz G4 Mac (OS X 10.3.9).

It came up with only 128GB accessible, which didn't bother me, as I could never use more than a fraction of even that.

Everything worked fine for about two months. Then the new drive began reporting all sorts of errors and failing to boot.

I reformatted and repartitioned the drive with Disk Utility.

The drive now works again, sort of. I can access the partitions. I can put 10-30GB of data there.

But any attempt to make a startup volume on the drive fails. I have tried cloning an OSX startup volume from my old 40GB drive, and also straight Finder copy of an OS 9 system folder (the one supporting Classic, so I know it works).

Both processes fail, leaving a few folders and files on the target volume. If I access these folders, Finder crashes and restarts. Sometimes the volume then disappears, and seems to lose its name, becoming "disk1s18" in Disk Utility, and unmountable.

I installed a second identical drive: the same problem appeared immediately.

I have tested both drives every way I can, including on a Windows PC I have. Nothing reports any errors or problems whatever. Even when a drive has a "folder of death", Disk Utility says it is fine.

Does anyone have any insight into this problem?

[Turboladdade]

It's been a super long time since I've owned a G4 tower, but from what I recall from all the stories of people using large drives, the basic gist is do not install drives larger than 128 GB in these computers. You'll have nothing but problems.