B&W Rev A - Is it really that bad?

[Gorgonops]

Unfortunately I don't know of a good third-party memory test to recommend for a B&W. (Apple's knowledge base article about G3 RAM errors "helpfully" recommends "MacTest Pro", which was apparently only available to authorized service providers.) I had to determine that RAM was the problem empirically, which *sucked*.

(The problem appeared after I'd swapped not only the RAM but the video card, so it was a matter of pulling and replacing parts to figure out what the issue was. Eventually, and I forget exactly what it was, I found something that would "reliably" make the machine produce errors or panic if there was RAM it didn't like present. It might of been transferring a *very large* file via scp and running an md5sum on it. It'd either crash doing one of those tasks or the md5sum of the resulting file would be wrong. Of course your mileage may vary... and also note I managed to let the problem trash an OS X install before I gave up mucking with it.)

 

[John Hokanson Jr.]

The ROM issue I'm referring to is the fact that the firmware has never been updated and it would only boot OS 8.5 or 8.6. Neither of which I own. I *do* have a good 9.2.2 disc though.

 

[FlyingToaster]

For the record, my girlfriend and I annihilated Mr. B/W with 2 sledgehammers about 4 years back one beautiful sunny summer afternoon after using 5 different working HDs from other G3/G4 macs and 2 days of troubleshooting. Something more creative, fun, proactive and not actually impossible to get working is to retrofit a G4 logic board and power supply in it's place and call it the magical cure. That would be a pretty good looking G4.

 

[racepres]

I have been running a B&W G3 Rev. A. for quite a few years without incident. Note However, that it uses a scsi pci card, and therefor, scsi HDD, both internal and external, bootable... Zero problems, Think I'll Keep her a few more years...

YMMV

RP

 

[Bunsen]

http://cgi.ebay.com/ACARD-AEC-6280M-DUA ... 0458521505
$29.95 shipped

I've seen that seller - and others - knocking out the 66MHz and 100MHz versions for even less.

You could also consider using the Firewire port and FW-PATA or SATA adapters/cases - you should have no problems booting in OS 9 with them, and with a case you gain the ability to easily swap drives between machines.

 

[Gorgonops]

For the record, a B&W cannot boot off of firewire. At all.

 

[kite210]

I've had my Rev. A B&W for about a month now and I'm not having any issues with it.

I've got an 80GB HDD right next to the 6GB drive and I haven't had any corruption issues, or crashes.

I even swaped the old DVD-ROM drive and replaced it with a 3rd party DVD/CD-RW drive and it even boots off of it with no complaints.

 

[protocol7]

Glad to hear it's all working out. It's possible I just got a lemon, but I can only speak from my own experience.

 

[H3NRY]

A B&W can be a very usable Mac if you use a PCI card for hard disk controller, and don't use FireWire for large file transfers. The built-in IDE interface is useless on a rev.A and can be problematic on rev.B (some work fine, some don't). FireWire on all 3 B&Ws I've worked with start corrupting with transfers over 100 MB or so. They are OK with smaller file transfers, but are no good for backing up disks to external drives, for example.

My suggestion is get a B&W if you like the style and take the plastic shell off and put it on a Sawtooth G4, which does have a working disk controller and FireWire. G4s are getting very cheap these days - cheaper than PCI disk controller cards for G3s.

 

[littlecloud92]

To OP:

To use any IDE drive with a Rev1 B&W, first stick the drive in a PC with IDE, make a HDAT2 bootdisk http://(http://www.hdat2.com/files/hdat2img_453.exe), boot from it, and use it to restrict the drive's transfer rate to either UDMA Mode 0 or PIO. It'll limit your transfer rate to 16.67MB/s but at least it'll play nice with the Rev1's IDE controller :beige:

I certainly hope that you are comfy with a DOS environment.

 

[protocol7]

I tried using HardDisk Toolkit to limit the drive speed but it still corrupted. I wonder if it would have worked better if I'd used that HDAT2 method. Guess I'll try it sometime

 

[littlecloud92]

To my knowledge, HDAT2 does it at the firmware level, I don't know about HD Toolkit, having never used it myself.

It might be just me, but I feel that PCs are way better at disk diagnostics than Macs are - reason being that PCs have a wider range of utilities that interact with the drive at a physical level vs. Mac utilities which operate at a logical level e.g DiskWarrior, Disk Utility.

 

[John Hokanson Jr.]

I am totally comfortable with DOS, but unfortunately don't have a PC. Thanks for the suggestion. The PCI SCSI or IDE card totally seems like the way to go with these things.

Assuming I even get one.