recommend a CD/DVD burner to me (G4 Yikes)?

[mraroid]

Hello....
 
I have installed a Yikes logic board in my Blue and White running a G4 at 500Mhz.   I have installed Panther and it seems to be running just fine. I also updated my video card to a ATI 9200.  I have a DVD of Tiger that I would like to install, but I only have a CD optical drive.
 
I am looking for a CD/DVD burner that I can install.  Are any available that will just work when I plug it in?  I would rather not patch my software to use an obscure drive. The faster the optical drive the better, but any CD/DVD burner that I can just plug in and have it work will be fine for now.  I have a lot of Mac software on DVDs and I want to be able to have a drive that can read them.
 
I have not had a chance to run any benchmarks, install OS 9 or do much of anything else.  But my subjective opinion of this upgrade is that it sure is snappy.  I like it.
 
Trying to buy a DVD burner on ebay is quite confusing to me.  I would like some recommendations.
 
Thanks in advance.
 
mraroid
 

 

[mraroid]

I was looking for internal Apple branded CD/DVD drives that are PATA/IDE/EIDE drives (I think that is what I want).
 
Again, I want to install a drive and not have to deal with any drivers or patch my stock system (if possible).  I want a plug and play drive that I can plug in, and have it read my apple branded Tiger DVD.
 
Would any of the following work?
 
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Mac-Tower-G3-G4-G5-DVD-R-CD-RW-Optical-Super-Drive-DVR-103PA-678-0269-TESTED/192548781788
 
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-G5-SuperDrive-DVD-Burner-IDE-DVDRW-PIONEER-DVR-106PB-678-0465B-TESTED/132802957660
 
https://www.ebay.com/itm/OEM-Apple-PowerMac-M9032LL-A-DVD-Writable-CD-RW-Drive-A1047-GWA-4082B-678-0489B/283245140256
 
Thanks in advance
 
mraroid
 

 

[Gorgonops]

Just for the record, the only issue with non-stock CD/DVD drives in the B&W and other towers is that the Apple iApps that do disk burning (iTunes/iDVD) won't work out of the box. Reading/booting isn't a problem with any standard IDE drive.

I have a third-party drive in my B&W and installing this:

http://www.patchburn.de/

fixed the iApps with no issues, and I had zero issues installing Tiger with it. If you're having trouble booting from an Apple-branded Tiger DVD with your B&W the problem lies elsewhere. (do you only have a CD-ROM drive?)

 

[mraroid]

Just for the record, the only issue with non-stock CD/DVD drives in the B&W and other towers is that the Apple iApps that do disk burning (iTunes/iDVD) won't work out of the box.

Thank you for helping me. 

What I have now is the stock CD drive that came with the B&W and it works perfect.  No issues. I used it to install a CD of Panther. I have a DVD of Tiger and I want to install it.  So I want to upgrade to a CD/DVD burner.  I do not know about comparability issues with DVD drives and my system.  Are you saying that any of the DVD drives I listed should plug in and just work?

Thanks

mraroid

 

[mraroid]

I did receive this replay from a ebay seller saying:

*******************************



I have one of these in a Blue and White G3 running 10.2, 10.3 AND 10.4 (partitioned drive) and it works fine; I did not add any drivers but I did run all of the software updates (which no longer can be downloaded via software update; I had to find them on the apple site manually). You might need to search for an additional 10.3.x update on the apple site. The only other thing you might need to do is fiddle with the jumper settings on the back of the optical drive.


**********************



 


 

The version of Panther I have installed is 10.2.3.  I tried to do a update from Apple, but they said I had none.

Can I go other places and find updates to the version of Panther I have installed?

Do I need to do this to make a CD/DVD drive work?

Thanks

mraroid

 

[Gorgonops]

For the most part an IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM/DVD drive is a CD-ROM/DVD drive. If you have an old PC lying around that has a DVD drive in it there's a very good chance you can pull that drive, install it in your B&W, and it will work just fine outside of *possibly* needing to install that "patchburn" thing to get CD burning working in iTunes under OS X. (There are exceptions to the compatibility rule but they would mostly concern *very* old IDE CD-ROM drives, pre-1998 or so.) There really is very little reason to worry about buying a drive pulled from an Apple machine. (The aforementioned DVD burner in my B&W was just on off-the-shelf cheap unit that I bought at Fry's for something like $25 brand new back in the day, I do not recall what brand it is.)

The only reason the iTunes/iDVD "incompatibility" exists is that Apple kept records of the firmware signatures of the drives they installed as stock equipment (IE, the OEM drives that they stamped the little Apple on the label) and put a check routine into the software to attempt to keep the burning functionality exclusive to people who paid Apple's "inflated" prices for machines equipped with burners. At least some of these drives don't have *any* Apple code in their firmware (IE, they didn't put a custom identification string into them like they did in the old days with the Apple-labeled SCSI drives that came in Beige Macs), they literally just look for a certain checksum that an off-the-shelf drive of the same model sold for PCs might also match. (Back in the day people used to maintain lists of matching drives, if you google hard enough you might find one.) All Patchburn does is zero out that artificial block so it matches any ATAPI CD/DVD burner, it doesn't change the actual driver at all. The firmware of the computer has no such artificial check, so unless you're unlucky enough to pick one of the tiny percentage of IDE DVD drives that has some API incompatibility with Apple's driver you don't need to obsess about it.

 

[Gorgonops]

... but if it makes you feel better to buy an Apple label drive than by all means buy it. You will not have to "patch" Panther for it, unless by some chance you buy a drive from newer machine like a G5 and it turns out that its drive signature doesn't match the artificial block mentioned above in such an old OS. Then you'd have to run Patchburn anyway to get it burning CDs.

 

[mraroid]

OK.  I think I got it.  I picked the first one on the list I posted.  It is the oldest of the three with a date of 2001.  I have never used iTunes, but might in the future.

Re the ribbon cable feeding the optical and (missing) Zip drive.  I can use eithe of the two connectors on the ribbon cable?  With only one drive on that chain, I set the pin to Master just like my CD optical drive and that is it, right?

I wil install OS9 on my Yikes after I have OSX set up.  For the most part, do CD/DVD drives work when reading CDs of OS 9?  No drivers or patches needed?

I think you can tell I am new to this...

Thanks for all the help.

mraroid

 

[mraroid]

Gorgonops and all....

You have given me an idea.  I have a SATA card in my B&W.  Could I buy an inexpensive SATA Windows CD/DVD burner and plug it into my SATA card and have a  chance of it working? I have 4 ports on my SATA card.  I am using one of the ports for my hard drive.

Thoughts?

mraroid

 

[trag]

I think there is a very good chance that would  work.  There are always outliers, so it might not work, but I think the chances are better that it will work.    Not exactly the same, but I put a no-name DVD-ROM drive on a PATA card in my X500 series machine and it has never given me a problem.   It's outlasted a lot of other drives too.

Kind of pricey when you add all the components, but I like this solution.   This slot loading drive is PATA and is only $8 and it is a Toshiba which is a brand often used by Apple.   This physical adapter from slimline to half-height 5.25" drive bounces in price from $17.50 up to its current price. 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001B7XYZO

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007C1KPQY

The final issue is you'll need a PATA/IDE to slimline (JAE 50) adapter, such as this:

https://www.amazon.com/Small-PCB-Slimline-Slim-50-Pin-Adapter/dp/B003NVTDCO

However, it is very hard to find one of those adapters which has jumpers for Master/Slave.   If the optical drive will be the only drive on the PATA cable, then it doesn't matter.  If I can find the link to the company that sells one with a Master/Slave setting I'll come back and post it.

Ah, found it.   The APA-CD1-JP (40 pin desktop), and the APA-CD2-JP (44 pin laptop, mini) from:

http://www.ameri-rack.com

http://www.ameri-rack.com/APA-CD1-JP.htm

http://www.ameri-rack.com/APA-CD2.htm

At the time (2017) they were $5.75 each with $10 shipping.   I had to email them to get pricing and place na order.

 

[Unknown_K]

Anything PATA that you can get your hands on should work fine.

Pretty sure this is the drive I stuck in a QS back in 2012:


LG Internal 22x Super-Multi DVD Rewriter 22X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 16X DVD+R DL 22X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-R 32X CD-RW 48X CD-ROM Black E-IDE / ATAPI Model GH22NP21B - OEM




Don't recall if I needed to remove the front drive cover or not (pops on and off easy enough without tools).

I recently snagged one of these:

[SIZE=18.6667px]Samsung writemaster SH-S202 DVD burner 20x20x12 lightscribe[/SIZE] NIB for a G5.

IDE drives used to be pretty common but they are harder to find these days. The 2012 order was probably a closeout. Internal SATA drives will be harder to find since newer gamer cases don't even have an optical drive bay anymore (and games are all downloads these days).

 

[Byrd]

Wouldn't the SATA card have trouble booting from an optical drive as you hold down 'C' at startup?

Anything Pioneer IDE, DVD, will work - I wouldn't bother with other brands are some have their quirks.

 

[Gorgonops]

Wouldn't the SATA card have trouble booting from an optical drive as you hold down 'C' at startup?

I'm pretty sure myself that those SATA cards don't accommodate bootable CD-ROM drives, for the aforementioned reason of no firmware support.

I guess maybe it's just me who can't seem to get old PCs out from underfoot fast enough, and therefore doesn't feel like finding a random PATA DVD burner should be that difficult of a problem.

 

[trag]

The SATA card would have to have Mac firmware as a first requirement.  Otherwise nothing connected to the card can be seen until after the OS starts loading.    To boot from an optical drive, the Mac firmware needs to have ATAPI support, I think.    Open to correction on that point.

I would be surprised to find that Sonnet's TSATA card and Acard's 6X90M series don't have ATAPI support.

 

[Unknown_K]

Sonnets Tempo SATA card boasts "Supports booting from any attached drive".

 

[Gorgonops]

My recollection, which may be totally off base, is that at least on the beige Macs/under OS <= 9.2.2 IDE cards present themselves to Open Firmware as a nebulous "scsi-like" storage device, and that's why they work with no loaded drivers... and I also vaguely recall that at least some of them didn't do CDROM drives, or at least didn't do them correctly, but that recollection is old and very possibly faulty.

I don't own a machine with one so I can't check to see how/if this support integrates with either holding down the "C" key or the graphical boot selector in New World Macs. Is someone who does have one willing to check? My point is that lacking explicit documentation to the contrary I would proceed with caution.

 

[Gorgonops]

... To lend support to my recollection, statements like this appear repeatedly in the manual for Sonnet's Tempo ATA133, here:

[SIZE=16.6667px]Support Note:[/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px] IDE hard drives attached to the Tempo ATA133 will [/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px]register as SC[/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px]SI devices to [/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px]the computer un[/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px]der Ma[/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px]c OS versions prior to [/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px]OS X. For ex[/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px]ample, in [/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px]Figure 7[/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px]the newl[/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px]y installed hard drive appears as <not [/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px]initialized> under Volume Na[/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px]me(s) and SCSI[/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px] under [/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px]Type.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16.6667px]Support Note:[/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px] IDE hard drives attached to[/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px]the Temp[/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px]o ATA133 will reg-[/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px]ister as AT[/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px]A devices to the computer under Mac OS X. For example, in [/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px]Figure 10[/SIZE][SIZE=13.3333px], the Connection Bus for a newly installed hard drive is listed as ATA.[/SIZE]

The manual also says *nothing* about adding removable drives to the card, it's targeted solely at hard drive devices.

Unfortunately the manual for the *one* bootable-on-PPC-Macs card I can find on Sonnet's site isn't available for download. (See FAQ ID 37 that claims that this is the only card that can host bootable volumes.) So if it says that the card supports CD-ROMs then, well, someone will have to point to a copy elsewhere. The FAQ collection does point out that target disk mode can't see drives connected to an add-on card, which shows that the level of integration with the BIOS is at least somewhat limited. Again, unless someone can say "I have one of these cards and have my DVD burner connected to it, and it totally boots" I would not count that chicken as hatched.

 

[Gorgonops]

Sonnets Tempo SATA card boasts "Supports booting from any attached drive".

And here's where I pedantically note that the website for this product actually says:
 

Key Features

• Affordable solution for adding 2 SATA ports to your computer
  
• 48-bit LBA support for drives larger than 137GB
  
• Supports Mac OS X mirroring and striping
  
• Boots from any attached hard drive
  

 

[Unknown_K]

I have an ATA card in my 8500 and the IDE CDROM is hooked up to it. You want me to see if I can boot of the optical using "c"?