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I finally got a colleague to sell the old G4 PowerMacs in his office on eBay. I had to promise to wipe the drives and eBay the machine off. In actuality, one of the drives in the machine had gone bad, so I had to pull it out. Anybody who has worked on a G4 PowerMac knows that the back drive bay is a little janky. You have to unscrew the carriage and kind of wiggle it out. It’s not a natural motion. I think the current crop of PowerMac’s make the situation a lot better.

Needless to say, I was having some issues with the drives. One was broken, the other I wasn’t sure about. I kept trying to start up with an old ‘slow as heck‘ Panther start-up disk. Each time, getting to the disk utility was such a pain (1Ghz G4 chips seem so slow now). Then, after wasting valuable time, I found I had to try something else and restart again.

Often times with tech problems, you have to be able to cut the problem in half and choose which half is the problem. With this issue, I couldn’t tell if the PowerMac had craped out or just the drives. But since all I have in the house now are MacBooks and small notebook backup drives, I had to have a way to test a big-ass 3.5 hard disk.

I finally broke down and bought one of these nifty-as-all-get-out “3 in 1 USB 2.0 To SATA / IDE Adapter Cable” deals from Amazon For The Win. Although a bit cheap, it does what it advertises. Just plug the adaptors up the way you want and then a USB cable will hook right into your laptop. For $13 bucks or so, it’s a ‘must-have’ item in your tech-man tool box. Eforcity shiped the thing fairly fast for like two-something bucks. I think it took 3 to 4 days.

I s’pose that some will say that external hard drive cases do the job just fine, but I think this niftly piece of plastic crap is the perfect combination of price and utilty. I look forward to using it for easier disk-cloning when hard drive prices come down.