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iMac Slotload Optical Drives in G4 Tower?

Mr. 680x0

Well-known member
What would need to be done to the iMac slotload CD and DVD drives to use them in on a regular IDE bus? Plug the IDE connector in off-centered and make a power adaptor?

 

MacJunky

Well-known member
hmm, what about a 50 pin connector from a SCSI cable? IIRC the iMac lobo uses a 50 pin like that. I just can't remember if the drive uses the same size of 50 pin connector.

If it does you could just hack that up and connect to a 40 pin PATA and a 4 pin molex connector.

 

Mr. 680x0

Well-known member
That's what I was thinking. I just need to know where to hack it onto. And I'd rather plug in a ATA cable, then make something else for power. Looking the actual cable and how it's cut off to go to the HDD, I could plug an ATA cable in off to the side and make an adaptor for the power.

 

~tl

68kMLA Admin Emeritus
The best option would be to change the little circuit board that's attached to the back of the drive. It should just unscrew. You then need something like this:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Laptop-Notebook-CD-DVD-ROM-Drive-to-desktop-IDE-adapter_W0QQitemZ160132544411QQihZ006QQcategoryZ41994QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

That will let you use a standard 40-pin ATA cable and power cable. Just plugging in a 40-pin cable into the 50-pin connector on the back of the drive won't work, as that connector carries power for the drive as well as the ATA signal. It would be possible to hack up something to work... but it'd be far easier just to get one of those adapters.

 

Mr. 680x0

Well-known member
Oh, if you remove that board it's an ordinary laptop drive connector? Cool, I can use regular laptop optical drives too. :D A G4 with dual slotloading drives on the front would be awesome. I could replace the eject button with activity LEDs.

Can you use tinyurl, please? :p The link is making the page too wide.

 

Mr. 680x0

Well-known member
I just noticed that the actual plug on the drive itself is backwards compared to a normal laptop CD drive. That means the adaptor would stick out about 3 inches.

 

MacJunky

Well-known member
Heh, for the drives in the SL iMacs, yea. However TL ones and things like Lombard PBs, certain iBooks, etc use more standard ATAPI drives. So you could probably grab a certain iBook drive or something online or look for compatible pc ATAPI drives.

 

Mr. 680x0

Well-known member
I know, but I want slotloading drives only. No trayloaders. My Acer has a slotloading DVD-R drive, but I'm definately not taking that out. :p

 

MacJunky

Well-known member
It was just an example. As most know there are a few pages somewhere about sticking slotloading drives in computers like that and they probably contain model numbers and such.

 
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