I'm Now A Member of the Cube Club

[JustG]

Picked up a G4 Cube locally today.  The price was too good to pass up.  No cracks in the plastic but there are a decent amount of scratches.  I haven't decided if I'm going to try polishing or just leave it as is.

Hard drive is loud (I'm going to start looking for a SSD solution) and the optical drive doesn't inject or eject without some help.  I'll have to do some research to see if the drive can be lubricated or if I should just start looking for a replacement out of a G3 iMac.

The one thing I'll need to start looking out for is a set of speakers.  The ones I got are busted up pretty badly.  I'd be surprised if they work at all, cloth is totally torn on one of the two.  I'm tempted to buy a cheap set of speakers from a G4 iMac and splice in the USB amp from the Cube.

Now to watch for a matching graphite Studio or Cinema Display to complete the set.

 

[TheDoctor]

I'd be interested in knowing what you end up using for an SSD in the Cube.  I've been thinking about doing the same with my own Cube, but I'm not sure what combination of IDE-SATA adapter and drive carrier will fit.

 

[pcamen]

I just took a pair of G4 iMac speakers and removed the cones and then used them to replace the ones in the G4 cube set.  They are pretty easy to get out but you have to unscrew the plate at the back to be able to pull the cord out to unsolder / solder the new set in.  IMHO this is better than splicing.  I used a angled pair of needle nose pliers to unscrew the plate with the three divet holes in it, which has a special tool that is unobtanium.

 

[JustG]

@TheDoctor I'll report back once I've had a chance to test a few things.  There are some inexpensive adapters and plates available.  Fitment will be the big concern.  It'll be a little while however, I'm budgeting repairs and upgrades for this machine and functional speakers are more important right now.

@pcamen Excellent idea.  I'm looking at eBay now for a set of G4 iMac speakers.

After doing some insomnia research it appears that the optical drive inject/eject issue is a common problem on the Cubes and iMacs.  So far none of the solutions I've found are long-term.  Adding a bit of masking tape to the rollers is reported to help but I'd rather not have something that will fall apart down the road and make things worse.

 

[Mighty Jabba]

I looked into OWC’s “Legacy” IDE SSD but apparently it won’t fit in the cube because of the way the airport card sits. Not sure if it would fit if you didn’t use the airport. I would also like to know what other options are available. 

 

[EvilCapitalist]

Picked up a G4 Cube locally today.  The price was too good to pass up.  No cracks in the plastic but there are a decent amount of scratches.  I haven't decided if I'm going to try polishing or just leave it as is.

Hard drive is loud (I'm going to start looking for a SSD solution) and the optical drive doesn't inject or eject without some help.  I'll have to do some research to see if the drive can be lubricated or if I should just start looking for a replacement out of a G3 iMac.

Welcome to the Cube owners club!  For an SSD I used an inexpensive IDE to SATA bridge board and a 120GB SSD.  As long as I'm not shaking the Cube like a snow globe (and really, why would anyone ever do that?) it seems perfectly fine.  There's enough tension in the IDE cable and the adapter / drive combo are so light I can't imagine it putting any real stress on anything, plus it's hard to beat a new SSD that works in the Cube with almost no effort apart from removing the old drive, and costs under $30:

Bridge board - $9.99 - https://www.microcenter.com/product/317195/kingwin-sata-to-ide-bridge-board

120GB SSD - $15.99 - https://www.microcenter.com/product/485877/inland-professional-120gb-ssd-3d-tlc-nand-sata-iii-6gb-s-25-internal-solid-state-drive-(120g)

I'd leave the internal drive as-is and just use an external firewire drive.  They can be had cheaply enough (usually under $30) and any replacement internal drive you find now is going to have similarly aged rollers. The other option of installing an aftermarket drive that doesn't have this problem is more difficult because only certain drives worked and you need a special mounting bracket to fit anything other than the standard drive in the case. which I haven't seen for sale in the past several years.

 

[JustG]

@EvilCapitalist Thank you for the excellent information, I hadn't looked at the prices of lower capacity SSDs in a while, they have gotten very reasonably priced.

Is it possible to split the case on the speaker audio amplifier?  It looks like it snaps together but before I go breaking anything, has anyone taken one apart before?  I might replace the speakers and wiring at that end instead of the speakers depending on how possible it is to split that box open.

 

[JustG]

Well, I replaced the speakers by rewiring through the USB amp.  That was a royal pain and if I did it again would go the @pcamen route and work from the speakers.  Got everything buttoned up, plugged them in to find that the amp doesn't work.  I suppose I have a nice prop to sit on a shelf now but really wanted a functional set of speakers grrr!

 

[EvilCapitalist]

My Cube originally didn't come with speakers and it took a loooooooooonnnng time for them to pop up for sale in both functional condition and at a non-highway robbery price.  Best bet would be to set up an eBay alert for their part number, M7963.  I still see them come up for sale every once and again.  For a good while there was a person selling NOS replacement speakers (just the speakers, not the USB amp) and I'm kicking myself that I didn't pick up a pair or two.  You can also pick up a cheap USB sound card but then you won't have matching speakers and you won't get the startup chime.  The one I've linked below I know for a fact works under both OS 9 and OS X, it sort of matches the Mac color scheme, and it's $9.99.

https://www.microcenter.com/product/444621/vantec-usb-stereo-audio-adapter

 

[Halcyon]

Hi, I'm a new G4 Cube owner in pretty much the same boat, stopping by years later to say thanks for the tips on the bridge board and 120GB SSD.

@JustG how did this setup work out for you?

 

[JustG]

Hey @Halcyon, the bridge board and SSD both are working great. I ended having to somewhat shoehorn the SSD in at an angle so the bridge board would physically fit where the old drive was. It's not pretty but it's been solid the past couple of years.

 

[Jockelill]

Welcome to the club! I have two Cubes and both with maxed out RAM and SSD. I 3D-printed a bracket for holding the SSD and used a similiar bridge board as above.

This is the bracket I used:

SSD bracket for a G4 Cube by dietervdf

WIP 11/08/2016: Will update the design soon. Using a smaller adapter I think I can arrange a better fit. The current model fits the Cube's IDE-connector very tight. 07/09/2016: V1 Want to fit a Sata SSD drive in your G4 cube, but having issues on how to fit it in? Here's a mounting bracket which...

www.thingiverse.com

 

[jasa1063]

I picked up one a few months ago at the local Free Geek Twin Cities. It had everything except the speakers, so I just went with an inexpensive USB audio solution. No startup bong, but that is pretty minor.

 

[Halcyon]

I installed an SSD over the weekend with using the Kingwin/Inland combo, but I ran into a couple problems:

1) After installing the SSD my Cube was completely unresponsive to the power button. I was alarmed that I had broken something, but I eventually figured out that the new 3.6V battery that I installed only a few days ago was dead! After swapping in a new one, I was able to power up. In the Apple service documents I found a note that if the PMU crashes, it shortens battery life from the normal 5 years to 2 days. I'd never heard of this, but seems in line with what I ran into.

I've reset the PMU by pressing the button on the logic board, so hopefully that helps. I'm not sure if there's any way to verify that the PMU reset was successful.

I'd read another post somewhere that mentioned the battery wasn't required to boot a Cube, that doesn't seem accurate in my case.

2) I booted up from an external Firewire drive that I loaded with the contents of the Power Mac G4 Cube Software Disc, SSW Version 9.1, CD version 1.2 disk image, then restored the image to the new SSD drive. The first time I tried this I got a checksum error during verification, but the second time the restore completed successfully without errors.

Unfortunately when I try to boot from the SSD I get stuck at the blinking question mark folder startup screen and I can't seem to get past this.

Has anyone else run into this? Can anyone confirm if the SSD should be configured as the IDE master or slave? The spinning disk drive I pulled out was configured as slave, but it was also not showing up so I don't have confidence that this is correct.

I'm wondering also if my assumption that I should be able to boot into 9.1 from an SSD is incorrect. Maybe this is an unsupported config?

 

[Halcyon]

Update:

I disconnected the IDE cable from the optical drive as a test and was able to boot from the drive, so it does seem like a problem with the master/slave settings.

 

[CC_333]

I got lucky and was given a pair of parts Cubes from @khannonnd several years ago in exchange for building him an SE/30. Even at the time, I couldn't afford to buy one, let alone two, so I jumped at the opportunity.

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