imac g5 hard drive question

peter tron · 6 Aug 2021 at 15:45

i have an old defunct imac and i want to rescue the hard drive.
from what i remeber when i last used it a few years back, the desktop showed a 'macintosh hd' but it also had a main hard drive for general use.

the one on the desktop could be used, but it was slower to transfer files onto, unlike the main one.

basically, from what i know it only came with the one drive in it, so is the desktop one like a partitioned section of the main drive?

apologies for all this, my knowledge is very much lacking.

Feek · 6 Aug 2021 at 16:05

The current filesystem (APFS) is a bit more complicated but on older filesystems, no. There was one partition, that was it. I have no idea why there would have been any difference in speed depending on how you access the drive.

peter tron · 6 Aug 2021 at 16:11

i think i'm explaining myself badly, i'm struggling to remember it all.
the drive on the desktop was not the main drive.
the main drive, from what i can remember, was accessed by clicking elsewhere?

Feek · 6 Aug 2021 at 16:14

peter tron said:
i think i'm explaining myself badly, i'm struggling to remember it all.
the drive on the desktop was not the main drive.
the main drive, from what i can remember, was accessed by clicking elsewhere?

Not in the twelve years plus I've been using Macs.

peter tron · 6 Aug 2021 at 16:47

yeah, sorry Feek

my memory is so foggy on this, as it has been many years since i last used it (before it packed up).

i think it must have been partitioned, as (now that i was just spending some more time thinking about it), i think there were two hard drive icons on the desktop, and the second one acted as though it was 'compressing' the files when i was adding to it?

the main drive above it worked as you would expect.

again, apologies for my foggy memories confusing my thread