Hi,

I have an original Bondi Blue iMac that I am trying to mod to accommodate two 3.5" hard drives as well as the original CD drive. I decided to test it before I did any modding, so I connected two hard drives using an IDE cable with two ports. Everything powers up fine, but when I boot into OS 8.5, the second drive does not show up on the desktop. It does show up in System Profiler, but it shows that it is not mounted. How do I fix this? I've tried formatting it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and Mac OS Extended, but it's not working, no matter what I try. Does anyone have any insight? Could it be some sort of BIOS or BUS limitation?

On a slightly related note, my CD drive doesn't appear to be working. I tried inserting an OS X disk, but it didn't show up on the desktop. Same thing when I tried a Ubuntu for Mac disk. I'm not sure if it was working before (I never tested it before I began the mod) or if my mod somehow messed it up. It does spin up, but nothing more than that. Also when I hold down the "c" key at boot, neither the OS X nor the Ubuntu installers come up.

Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I do not believe that the iMacs supported cable select for hard drives because they were designed for one. Your issue resembles that of having two drives with the same jumper configuration. Also, the CD drives are on the same ATA bus. So, if your internal drive is pinned as master (which pre-10.2 drives had to be) and your new drive is pinned incorrectly, you wouldn't be able to see it mount.

P.S. Thanks for making me work out my brain on classic hardware. That's been a while.

I had one drive set to Master, the other to Slave. I never set them as Cable Select.

I'm not 100% sure on this one, but does the iMac have two ATA cables? If it was indeed designed for one hard drive, the CD drive could be set to slave mode already.

Does the optical drive mount when you only have one hard drive attached? (the original master?)

It seems to have a proprietary connector for the CD drive, but it is possible that it is just an ATA connection built to Apple specifications. It's on a separate, smaller cable, so I figured it must use a different bus. If it is the just another ATA connector, I wonder if it would still be possible to add a second hard drive? What I find most interesting is its ability to recognize both hard drives and the optical drive at once, but not be able to initialize the other hard drive. I don't know if it would even recognize two slaves?