This is the slightly ongoing saga of my dead PowerMac - a very old but until recently, trustworthy G4 Dual 450Mhz Gigabit Ethernet that served as my back-up machine.

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The drives were beginning to give out; the machine had been running all day every day for probably a couple of years (if not more) and the 20Gb, 30Gb and 120Gb drives were on their last legs, so I decided to upgrade and bought 2 shiny new 250Gb drives, with the intention of setting them up as a 250Gb mirrored RAID, with the OS remaining on the 120Gb (the most reliable of the old drives).

The drives arrived and were duly installed, only to find, when trying to power up, that the machine was dead; I mucked about with batteries, reset switches and the like and came to the conclusion it was probably the logic board (I know someone with a Quicksilver PowerMac that died and exhibited the same symptoms). It was looking like a sad day for the trusty tower, when I got the estimate for fixing it - well over £200 … until the 'Bay came to the rescue with a second hand logic board, shipped from the States for a bargain price of £35.

However, when it finally arrived, it turned out not to be the problem! In that case, it must be the power supply (confirmed with a multi-meter). £100 price tag looking likely, until … bargain … all in for £55.

So, now I have a working tower, but the saga doesn‘t end there … firstly I’ve now got a spare logic board (supplied complete with processor); I quite fancy trying my hand at either an obvious mod (2u rack server) or a crazy one (ala PC in toy Millennium Falcon). Secondly, and more annoyingly, these old machines have a limit on the drives you can use internally - it only recognises the 250Gb drives as 128Gb! Doh.

Options:-

1. Stick the drives in an external firewire/USB2 case - not cheap (£65) but very versatile - can hook them up to any of my machines.

1. Buy an internal PCI ATA card (£20) - gives me hardware RAID (better than the software RAID I was going to use), but may not work with OS X (if it requires drivers).

At this point, I don't really know; the cheap option seems like the way forward; spent enough on the old beast already!