Member Avatar for normanhilda

Hi I have a Mac Tower beige O/S Tiger 10.4.11. The hard drive has given up. Can I use an external drive or do I have to try and replace the old drive. I know this is an old Computer put I don’t want to junk it. Thanks Norm.

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A few practical points that weren’t covered yet and will help anyone with a beige Power Mac running Mac OS X 10.4.11.

Confirm the model first (menu > About This Mac or the serial on the case) so you know whether the machine is a PATA/IDE or SATA machine and what its upgrade limits are. That determines which replacements and adapters will work. As and pointed out, don’t rush to throw parts at it until you’re sure the drive is actually dead.

If you want the fastest, least-invasive route: use a FireWire external enclosure. Older PowerPC Macs reliably boot from FireWire if the disk is formatted with Apple Partition Map and Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and has a PPC-compatible Tiger install. USB external drives are often unreliable or unsupported as boot volumes on these older towers, so prefer FireWire for booting or data rescue.

If you prefer an internal fix: most beige-era towers used 3.5" PATA (IDE) drives. Modern 3.5" SATA drives can work with a PATA-to-SATA adapter or you can source a used PATA drive. A compact-flash-to-IDE adapter is also a popular low-power option (good for quieter operation) but CF/SD media have limited write endurance, so pick a high-end card if you go that route. SSDs will work only with suitable adapters and will be limited by the older bus speed.

Data-recovery workflow: remove the old drive and connect it to another machine via a USB-to-IDE/SATA adapter or a FireWire enclosure to copy important files. If the drive clicks or smells burnt, stop and consider a professional recovery service. If you lack install discs, either borrow a Tiger install disc or install OS onto an external FireWire disk from another Mac and boot the tower from that.

Check the exact model before buying RAM or drives (specs vary a lot). Replacing the drive is usually the cheapest long-term fix; using a FireWire boot disk is the quickest way to get the Mac back online.

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Member Avatar for jordan0420

tiger is getting older and more outdated. Mackintosh is preparing to release the final of the OSX in the spring/summer months. I would personally do one of two things, get a new hard drive that gives you more storage than you will ever need and use it as a ftp server to free up your main computer. or get a decent drive and install a ppc linux distro on it. having linux on it would make the computer faster and last longer.

as for using an external hard drive, the bootdrive would need to be configured i am unsure of how to do this i know that booting from a cd would be apple (command) C and that booting into the kernal with no GUI is apple (command) S.

unless you are absolutley sure that the harddrive is dead beyond fixing try to boot while pressing the apple S, and try to run through the filesystem. i recently had a problem with my tiger tower that appeared to be caused by harddrive failure. in the end a clean re-install of the OS fixed all the problems

Member Avatar for royng

You might want to change a new hard drive. This had to be done by certified apple technician after changing a new one check if the mac can run the new hard drive if can re install the mac. You can insert a hard disk and have the Macintosh HD install on it but it would be troublesome.

Member Avatar for royng

you might want to follow jordan0420 and make sure the hard drive is really dead. If the hard drive is dead go and change a new one make sure you backup your important data. I suggest you upgrade the ram speed to 4 GB, this will make your macbook faster or you might want add memory until it is 500 GB but that is a lot of GB for someone who uses the macbook normally

Member Avatar for normanhilda

I want to thank every body for their help I managed to resolve the problem. Regards norm

Member Avatar for royng

Good luck. Hope this time your hard drive life can last longer

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