Full capacity of the Hard drive not seen on MAC desktops

[Panchu]

Hi,I have a MAC Power G4 series desktop and operating system is MAC OS X 10.2.8.Capacity of my hard drive is 500gb.The problem is whenever i run disk utility it shows the capacity of my hard drive as 128gb.How do I fix this problem as I m not able to access the full capacity of my hard drive...?Do i need to replace my hard drive....?

[T.J.]

The problem mentioned by you is a basic problem faced by users of earlier version of G4 power series.It is known as LBA or Logical Block Addressing.Earlier versions of the G4 series can only detect drives up to 128gb and not more than that.You can also search for different tools available for resolving this problem.My suggestion would be to get your hard drive replaced by a hard drive with a capacity which is recognised by your computer.

[Rawko]

Yes,There is a solution for the LBA problem of the older G4 series but its not free.To solve this problem you will have to purchase a PCI ATA controller and connect your 500gb hard drive to it.There are number of dealers which manufacture this cards.Once you install this card and connect it to your hard drive you will be able to access the full capacity of your hard drive but you will not be able to boot from this hard drive.

[deoWo]

The PCI ATA controller cards will definately solve the problem but will not work with the OS version you are using.The PCI ATA controller card,which is primarily for SATA will support 2 ATA drives but will require OS version of 10.4 or later.Instead of using a controller card there are certain software available which will allow you to partition bigger drives into 127GB chunks which will allow you to use almost all of the drive capacity.