Shane makes it look easy

Ok, to start, I've been reading about Shane's exploits for a long time on lafcpug here and now on his blog and he's had some interesting rigs involving rubberbands (i seem to remember that was you in a g5 with a rubberbanded set of drives) and now his latest macbeast.

Well i've had my mac pro since about a month or so before the octos came out. And Since then I've added a HDD a few times, which started first as a place to put media, than it was a third drive to put music and project files on. then it was another drive which i raided with the other 500 inside to create a 1tb raid 0 setup. I repartitioned 1 drive to install leopard on 1 part and keep music and projects on another.

So at this point I'm up to 4 drives, and 1 optical drive and the stock 2 gigs of ram (i know...i know)

So when the second gen leopard running octo macs came out new ram came out to work with them, and since that ram is backwards compatible (ie works on previous gen macs) the older ram got cheap, so 8 more gigs went in and I found out how cheap apple is now, I found 4 sticks of 556mg ram in there which ended up making me fill my risers with ram bringing me to 10 gigs (new macpros come with 2 1 gig sticks fyi)

Ok, so I'm all filled up right? hehe, wrong. I found out,as a few people know (shane included) about those 2 extra sata ports on the motherboard. So i decided thats 2 extra ports too many, and found this little install kit:

http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&p...

so It came on wed of this week my drives were do to arrive the next day but i had a 7 hour mournign shift and back to back classes after that so i started the hard part that day, which involves wiring the 2 sata cbales down to the motherboard and assembling this little aluminum rig to mount the drives. Really the only hard part is the wiring. So Shane talked about doing this, what he doesn't mention is he has a v2 macpro. If you have a v1, mac pro to take that fan assembly out involves loosening the ram chassis, taking off the cover for the processors' heat sink, taking the processor assembly up and then unscrewing the fan assembly. to say the least I didn't do this.

Here was my method.

Step 1: Remove optical cage and drive(s) and set them asside. Remvoe drives from Bay 1 and bay 2

Step 2: run cables down through the opening of the optical drive section. and down above the Fan section around where drive bay 1 is

step 3: using pliers of the needle nose variety, or tiny fingers, or both, or magic if you have it, plug in the cables to the 2 sata ports (bottom one first as it has the least accessibility)

Step 4: TAKE EXTREME CARE HERE! apply tension to the cables and bring the excess slack back into the optical bay section. and run the wires below the sata connection on the back of bay 1.

Step 5: Clean Up your ready for install of the max upgrade drive cage.

ok so now that that was done I closed up and started using my computer for the next 2 days until my next free day.

So here it is today. I installed the 2 drives and the burner, and closed up with 2 new drives installed, and i grabbed my windows 64 installers (btw if you look around you can find these drivers supplied with the new mac pros)

Ok windows time:

So I start to run through the bootcamp motions for the first time, and after about 90 minutes of banging my head against the wall (6 drives in a computer complicates thing, having 2 of those raided, and 1 of them split in 2 makes it worse) so i pulled out every drive but the 1 split in 2 with my leopard drive and the blank 1. still no go.

then I realized the windows reformat bios wasn't reading the extra drives off the mother board. So I pulled out the assembly, and switched the leopard drive with the blank 1 (now in bay 2) and for the last hour or more i've been waiting for this partition to work. So far...well we will see.

I'll finish posting when I have it going and running Eyeon's Fusion.

Side note, any one know if you can run parallels or fusion off an actual windows boot drive and/pr 64bit?

I'll try and grab pics if I can steal a camera from my friend (yea im about the only person I know who doesn't have any form of digital camera besides the 1 they stuck on my phone).

Enjoy

-Zander