Power Macintosh G3 Minitower Upgrades

[Dimitris1980]

I have a plextor dvd drive that reads and writes and i would like to connect it to my g3 in order to have two dvd drives. The one connected now only reads dvds and cds. Is there a technical info that i have to know? What is happening with the cable which is for the direct sound from the cd?

 

[NJRoadfan]

Beige G3s can take standard ATX power supplies (mine is running one right now). There is a jumper that you have to change on the motherboard in order for them to work.

 

[Unknown_K]

Beige G3s can take standard ATX power supplies (mine is running one right now). There is a jumper that you have to change on the motherboard in order for them to work.

Yes, you just have to make sure the holes line up and the unit fits.

 

[Dimitris1980]

Today I replaced the apple 6x dvd drive with a plextor dvd writer 2004 model which I successfully burned a toast image. My computer is a power Macintosh g3 Minitower 300mhz with zip drive, 120 gb hard drive and ati Radeon 7000 mac edition 32mb vram. I wanted to have both dvd drives but all the ide cables seemed to be  connected to the other devices. What can i do in order to be able to have both dvd drives and the zip drive connected? Where can I find a suitable cd bezel because the plextor hits the original bezel and cannot be come out? And finally can i burn bin/cue images in order to play games with the music directly from cd?

 

[Unknown_K]

Today I replaced the apple 6x dvd drive with a plextor dvd writer 2004 model which I successfully burned a toast image. My computer is a power Macintosh g3 Minitower 300mhz with zip drive, 120 gb hard drive and ati Radeon 7000 mac edition 32mb vram. I wanted to have both dvd drives but all the ide cables seemed to be  connected to the other devices. What can i do in order to be able to have both dvd drives and the zip drive connected? Where can I find a suitable cd bezel because the plextor hits the original bezel and cannot be come out? And finally can i burn bin/cue images in order to play games with the music directly from cd?

Remove the optical drive faceplate from the tray.

 

[Cory5412]

If I'm remembering correctly, the typical configuration is for the optical and Zip drives share an IDE channel in the Beige G3.

You'll need to put in a card if you want to have two optical drives and a Zip drive in the machine.

Otherwise, if you used an IDE/SATA/SCSI card for your storage, you should be able to use the cabling originally meant for the stock hard drive for another optical drive. You might need to find and insert a longer IDE cable, however, since I believe the IDE cables enter the top/hinged part of the case at the top, and I am making the presumption that your DVD drive is at the bottom part of there.

I don't believe Toast can burn bin/cue images, you'll probably need ot burn those on a modern computer with the appropriate tools.

 

[Dimitris1980]

Can i disconnect the zip drive and connect the one dvd drive there? The zip drive is useless for me.

 

[Brett B.]

Sure you can, just pay attention to master/slave/cable select jumpers on the drive(s).

To add to what Cory said:  Rev 1 ROMs in these things do not support two IDE drives per channel.  Rev 3 does for sure, I think Rev 2 does but not sure anymore.  If you can find a Rev 3 ROM SIMM, you can use up to 4 IDE devices in your G3 without a PCI IDE controller.  It's a super easy fix but finding the part these days might be harder than it was 15 years ago when I built mine... 

 

[trag]

Sure you can, just pay attention to master/slave/cable select jumpers on the drive(s).

To add to what Cory said:  Rev 1 ROMs in these things do not support two IDE drives per channel.  Rev 3 does for sure, I think Rev 2 does but not sure anymore.  If you can find a Rev 3 ROM SIMM, you can use up to 4 IDE devices in your G3 without a PCI IDE controller.  It's a super easy fix but finding the part these days might be harder than it was 15 years ago when I built mine... 

Yep, rev. 2 and rev. 3 or more commonly, Rev. B and Rev. C ROM both support slave drives on the IDE busses.   I doubt that it matters if one mixes optical and hard drives on the same IDE cable.  The IDE support in those machines is only 16 MB/s.   And the hard drives that shipped with them were even slower.   

So, if one has a stock hard drive, one can get a decent speed up just by installing a  more modern drive that will take full advantage of the 16 MB/s IDE bus.    Add an ATA-133 card and a drive that can keep up with it (realistically, I bet the CPU can't serve better than about 60 MB/s)  and the speed boost will be even more substantial.

 

[Dimitris1980]

Does someone know where can i find a plate/bezel like the one of the attached picture?

 

[Brett B.]

I am pretty sure I have one... I will check my parts stash.

 

[Dimitris1980]

Did you find something Brett?

 

[Brett B.]

Forgot to look the other night - found what I was looking for today but it's not what you are after. It's a bezel for 3.5" devices, not 5.25" ones unfortunately. Great for a Zip, Jaz or tape but not a CDROM...

 

[Dimitris1980]

Ok Brett,

thank you for the answer.

 

[Dimitris1980]

One more question. When i turn on the computer, i have to wait for some seconds in order to start booting. Is this normal? My macintosh LC475 boots immediately.

 

[EvilCapitalist]

Yes, that's just the machine going through the RAM test.  Only happens on a cold boot and you can disable it in the Memory Control Panel if you hold down Command and Option and then open the panel.  You'll end up with something similar to this screenshot:

 

[Dimitris1980]

Back again after long time. I disabled the startup memory tests but no success. Yesterday i checked the time. It takes 1 minute for the screen to show up and and then about 1 minute and 20 seconds for mac os 9.1 to start. The same time with the memory tests on and off. I did the same with mac os 8.1 and again it takes 1 minute for the screen to show up and about 50 seconds for mac os 8.1 to start. Again with memory tests on or off  the same time. I have a hard drive 120 gb with 3 partitions. One for Mac OS 8.1, one for Mac OS 9.1 Greek and Mac OS 10.2 and one for Mac OS 9.2. I remember some months before that i connected also one more dvd drive in order to have two of them installed on my power mac and when i booted the Macintosh, the screen showed up immediately. But i couldn't figure what was happening because it seemed that the computer was confused and couldn't arrange which drive to use and eject. So i kept only one dvd drive installed (a plextor one  dvd writer).

 

[trag]

I haven't read the whole thread, but if you have some cards installed that add additional SCSI busses that can lengthen your boot time.  IDE/PATA cards look like SCSI cards to the Mac OS.   The system will spend time scanning all 7 (or 15) SCSI IDs on every bus installed.   So, the built-in bus, plus a couple of cards that maybe add four more busses, and the time just scanning SCSI busses can add up.

If something isn't terminated properly, that can stretch it out more as scans get retried.

 

[Dimitris1980]

Back again with good news. I returned today from vacation so i plugged again all the electronic devices (televisions, media players, computers). When i leave i always unplugged them all. Now the Power Macintosh G3 boots immediately! I do not have to wait for so long. I turned it off some times, i booted from 8.1, 9.1 greek and 9.2 and worked with all operation systems.