So, in an attempt to be formatting and reinstalling systems at an even greater rate than our good buddy Hipgnosis, I am hooking up a fresh install of Mac OS 10.4 on Greyboy, my trusty G4 DP. I swapped out the memory for two fresh sticks of 256 and a stick of 512, and I added an 80GB Western Digital WD800 attached to the built-in IDE controller for the OS.

For the last few months, I have been booting a WD2500 attached to an ATA133 controller card. However, when updating to 10.4 using OS X’s Archive and Install feature, the system got all loused up. Something went wrong during the upgrade, failing to transfer my user account information as it should have and performing incredibly slowly after the install. Rather than trying to rebuild that install to its former glory, I opted instead to use a separate drive for the system drive and use the WD2500 for data.

There will be some advantages, one of which being faster boot time. This Mac hasn’t had a drive on the internal IDE controller for a long, long time. I ran a U160 SCSI drive array before hooking up the WD2500, so it’s been booting from a controller card (slowly) for days.

The initial OS install is done now, so I’m off to install system updates followed by my suite of design apps, a cadre of other helpful utilities and apps (i.e Transmit, Interarchy, Toast, Popcorn, Suitcase, Firefox, iLife 05, etc.), then reconfigure my iTunes library, iPhoto library, iMovie data folders, and my personalization options.

It will be nice to have Greyboy firing on all cylinders again…it’s been almost unusable since the 10.4 upgrade.