G4 Rescue!

[superseth]

Early this morning I was alerted to some G4's discarded on the streets of San Francisco so I headed over to the spot and grabbed a Yikes 350 and a totally gutted Sawtooth 400. They are super dirty but I hope to get the Yikes working at least if possible, saving one of these little guys from the recycle graveyard.

Unfortunately the CPU on the Yikes is missing the retention clips. Outside of buying a whole new heatsink anyone know where I could find one of those? The only cooler with a clip I can find on ebay right now is a g3 one from Australia which probably would do the trick on a 350mhz cpu.

I suppose I could also just get a CPU for the sawtooth, but I was trying to fix as much of what was there as possible.

 

[volvo242gt]

You might check with Herb Johnson. He says he gave up offering heatsinks, but, you might be able to get him to send the clip you need, plus the parts necessary to get the AGP graphics machine going.

https://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/m_imac.html#g4parts

 

[alectrona2988]

Do I see another G4 system with no handles on it or is it just me?

 

[superseth]

Thanks for the tip! I found a 400mhz G4 CPU on ebay that will at least get the AGP machine up and running. Then I can test parts out in that. There was another, quicksilver I think, that was missing the handles and most of the internals.

Are Yikes machines rare at all? I know they weren't made for a long time. If I can't get it working I might keep the CPU to eventually try out in a G3 machine once I get around to pulling some out of storage.

 

[volvo242gt]

Sure, glad I could help.

They're quite uncommon. Basically, they're a B&W G3 with a G4 processor, graphite/clear plastics, and the omission of the ADB port. The solder pads are there for the ADB port, but you might have to add the chip, etc, to activate said port.

 

[superseth]

Well good news is that I found a generic CPU cooler that was able to fit on the 350 PCI cpu without too much trouble and after some battery removal and resetting I got it to boot off an old OS 9 cd I had around. Luckily I had an old Compact Flash to IDE adapter spare (don't have any IDE hard drives around and the machine was stripped of drives when I found it) and got everything installed on a compact flash card that boots fine. I guess the PCI version won't boot off USB or Firewire?

One down, one to go as far as booting is concerned!

 

[Cory5412]

Welcome in! These look like great finds and it looks like you're making good progress!

Yeah, that's correct, the PCI PowerMac G4 can't boot from firewire or USB. It's, as volvo242gt mentioned, the same platform as the blue G3, which itself is very very similar to the beige G3. Though, the PCI PowerMac G4 does have IDE that behaves better than those, which is nice.

A CF or SD card will probably be good enough as a hard disk replacement if you're mainly running OS 9, but it'll depend on what you do with them, things like capturing video or

I think the Sawtooth can boot OS 9 over USB, although you need the boot partition to be 200 gigs or less. (otherwise 9 supports up to 2tb disks.) (I've done this with like a uSB SD/CF card reader and normal flash drives)

 

[volvo242gt]

Yeah, IIRC, the IDE fix was with the revision 2 board, which is a Yikes! board with ADB and a G3 processor, in a Yo!..semite case...

 

[LCARS]

That's quite a find! To date the only "street find" I've ever come across was a Gateway 2000 CRT out in the rain. In college there was a giant pile of late '80s Mac (almost all IIci units) being discarded but Facilities wouldn't let me have any. Did I think about scaling the fence at night? Oh yes.

 

[volvo242gt]

My old 2008 Mac Pro was a curbside find that a buddy of mine found in his neighborhood.

-J

 

[LaPorta]

To help with your panels:

 

[superseth]

Thank you for all the info everyone! I got them both up and running, though the 350mhz PCI doesn't like booting from my IDE->SATA cards sadly, even when switching to an old SATA drive from a macbook. Sticking with my Compact Flash adapter since that seems to work fine and give me decent speed.

For the 400mhz (well it was nothing originally as it was missing a CPU...) - THERE IS NOW A CPU! And I found a video card on craigslist for the AGP slot.

Anyway they both have a bootable drive and some ram/rage 128 graphics and I'll be messing around with them a bit more this coming weekend I think.

If anyone from here is in the SF bay area and would be interested in one of these, I certainly don't need 2 of them sitting around. Thought I would ask here before putting one on craigslist.

 

[CircuitBored]

I absolutely love stories like these, especially when they concern some of my favourite computers. Without people like @superseth keeping an eye out these machines may well have gone to landfill, which is of course a huge waste when there are still thousands of people out there who want them.

Congratulations on a successful rescue! If you ever need a hand finding parts for these just drop me a message. I can barely move for G4 parts.