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I bought a G4 Mac Mini, because I thought it might be fun to mess around with classic mac software someday, and I didn't want to get something large that would take up a lot of room, so that meant getting a mini.
Naturally I had to upgrade the spinning hard disk in it, because hard drives suck. After much searching I discovered you can buy mSATA to 2.5" IDE adapters fairly cheaply, which enable you to put a fast SSD into a 2.5" laptop sized IDE case. I got one, got an mSATA drive, and was all set.
I performed the upgrade... and could not get the computer to boot from a CD. I tried cloning the existing OS to the new drive, and could not get the cloned drive to boot. Key combinations that were supposed to force a mac to boot from optical disk failed to work. After weeks of banging my head against this wall, I finally realized that the original drive in the Mini was set as a secondary IDE drive, rather than the default primary drive. Fortunately the adapter had pins for a jumper. I took the jumper off the old drive, put it on the new drive, reassembled the Mini for the 6th or so time, and... it worked perfectly.
Long ago, in the early oughts, I knew about IDE drives and jumper settings, and I knew that you could only have one drive set as primary at a time. But I had utterly forgotten about all that crap in the intervening decade. It doesn't help that most IDE laptops (and the mini is just a headless laptop) had two channels, one for the CD and one for the hard drive, so you didn't have to think about primary/secondary. But Apple made the Mini using the cheapest, most minimal possible combination of parts, which means one channel. Since the optical drive has no jumpers and is always set as primary, the hard disk has to be set as secondary.
None of the instructions I used, neither Apple's tech repair manual nor Ifixit, mentioned that you have to set the new IDE drive to be secondary. I looked online and found exactly zero of the top hits for Mac Mini G4 upgrade mentioned jumpers at all.
Naturally I had to upgrade the spinning hard disk in it, because hard drives suck. After much searching I discovered you can buy mSATA to 2.5" IDE adapters fairly cheaply, which enable you to put a fast SSD into a 2.5" laptop sized IDE case. I got one, got an mSATA drive, and was all set.
I performed the upgrade... and could not get the computer to boot from a CD. I tried cloning the existing OS to the new drive, and could not get the cloned drive to boot. Key combinations that were supposed to force a mac to boot from optical disk failed to work. After weeks of banging my head against this wall, I finally realized that the original drive in the Mini was set as a secondary IDE drive, rather than the default primary drive. Fortunately the adapter had pins for a jumper. I took the jumper off the old drive, put it on the new drive, reassembled the Mini for the 6th or so time, and... it worked perfectly.
Long ago, in the early oughts, I knew about IDE drives and jumper settings, and I knew that you could only have one drive set as primary at a time. But I had utterly forgotten about all that crap in the intervening decade. It doesn't help that most IDE laptops (and the mini is just a headless laptop) had two channels, one for the CD and one for the hard drive, so you didn't have to think about primary/secondary. But Apple made the Mini using the cheapest, most minimal possible combination of parts, which means one channel. Since the optical drive has no jumpers and is always set as primary, the hard disk has to be set as secondary.
None of the instructions I used, neither Apple's tech repair manual nor Ifixit, mentioned that you have to set the new IDE drive to be secondary. I looked online and found exactly zero of the top hits for Mac Mini G4 upgrade mentioned jumpers at all.
