Forums | MacLife

Reformat one of your pc hdd's to Mac OS extended (journaled). Not sure how to do this though. And there are specifications that the hdds must comply to be installed on a Mac. You'll have to wait till someone with more knowledge on the subject posts here.

crazycsa wrote:

I just got my first Mac, it came without a Hard drive I'm wondering if Mac hdd's are different from PC's because I have a lot of them

They are not - any old PATA drive will work, though some versions of the G4s used older ATA controllers with a 128 GB drive limit. The same limit is present in many older PCs. The minimum necessary to install the latest version of Mac OS is 10GB or so.

I hope you have an OS install CD.

You now you ordered a vintage os right?

Wow that's like 1995 when 8.1 came out right? Did you buy your computer for like $50? It may be very difficult to get that computer to do anything you want by today's standards.

Next time ask first.

Now, you should give it NO LESS than 512 MB ram. Should be at least 1 Gig, really.

Also get OS X for it. I think it can handle OS X 10.4.

You'll be able to do a lot on that machine still. Especially if it's run of the mill office stuff like email, Web, word processing, scanning documents, keeping your digital photos in order, itunes and so on. You should be able to do movie editing and music composition (garage band) though definitely slower than a new machine.

My G4 isn't much faster than yours but I use it all the time as my main machine. I can't believe it's "old", I'm impressed by it every day.

And you can put in heaps of HD's, I've got like 1TB, and you can extend it's life and versatility by installing things like PCI cards with USB2 ports.

Look for tips on how to get cheap speed: basically max out the memory, and have big HD and your machine should be good for a while.