Just put a 250GB hard drive in my eMac. Seeing 128GB. Huh?

[mattkime]

>>That model is subject to the 128GB ceiling.

Really? Plenty of people on xlr8yourmac report success.

[threeprong]

[quote Silencio]That model is subject to the 128GB ceiling. You can try the Intech HiCap drivers to go beyond that. http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Intech%20USA/SPEEDHCCD/
I think it can handle the larger drives. Tons of examples online.

3P

[JoeH]

Straight from the Developers Notes at Apple, the original eMac 700 and 800 MHz models with nVidia graphics support ATAPI-5 on their ATA bus. 48-bit addressing came in with ATAPI-6, the next revision of the ATAPI standard. Short of using something like the Intech drivers, the bus will not address more than 128 GB. I don't think you are going to find any examples of 700 MHz models of the eMac successfully using more than 128 GB without such drivers. The 800 MHz and 1 GHz models with ATI graphics do support ATAPI-6 and can address drives over 128 GB.

[RAMd®d]

Have you tried a low level reformat?

You cannot do a low level format on an IDE HD. Even if you could, it wouldn't "give back" the missing capacity.

Tiger won't help. As mentioned, only software like the Intech driver will help. There is/can be a problem when using that drive in another computer, but I don't remember exactly what it is.

[mattkime]

>>You cannot do a low level format on an IDE HD.

You can erase the partition map.

>>I don't think you are going to find any examples of 700 MHz models of the eMac successfully using more than 128 GB without such drivers.

You will on the xlr8yourmac drive upgrade db but it seems our info is off the mark somewhere so who knows...

http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/drivedb/se...vedb.lasso

[Jimmypoo]

I would hit it with a hammer.

[JoeH]

If you go to this article on Apple's site, they give details on which Macs support 128 GB drives:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86178

Specifically they state models introduced after June 2002. The original eMac was introduced in April 2002. Now it is possible there was a silent change during production before the 800 MHz and 1 GHz ATI graphics models officially came out with large drive support, and some later 700 MHz eMacs can support large drives. But that is only possible under OS X, and was not announced. Don't know how you would be able to tell except by trying a large drive, and in this case it looks like the answer is no.

As for xlr8yourmac, most of the entries for eMacs do not say which model. So it is not possible to say much based on its database entries. Even Mike Breeden qualified large drive support for eMacs with this comment on a report from last November:

"Mike Comments: (reader FYI - the FAQ's iMac section has link to PDF Superdrive install guide for eMacs. eMac later models at least have native big drive support - i.e. not limited to 128GB HD capacity like older macs.)"

Only three entries say they had a 700 Mhz eMac and were able to use a drive larger than 128 GB. One had to initialize the drive in a Firewire case on another system first to get the full capacity. So the final determining piece of information needed might be the date of manufacture of the specific eMac 700 getting a hard drive upgrade.

[threeprong]

Crapola.

I guess i have an early eMac with only 128GB support.

So, I'm buying INtech's drivers and doing two 127GB partitions.

Space is space I guess.

3P

[rz]

not sure what problems you've heard about with externals... I would just put it in an external case and be done with it.

[threeprong]

No room for anything but the eMac .

I like it clean.