Gee Three

[protocol7]

Three weeks ago I didn't have any towers, just laptops and AIOs. Now in as many weeks I've added three to the collection (though one still remains out of action).

Today I picked up a B&W G3 350. Came with the original screen, keyboard, original greeny power cables and a couple of other bits including an external HD as there's no internal drive (yet). Alas, no hockey puck mouse but I can always pick one up later. It's in pretty good shape. Has a few cracks around the screws in the casing but that's to be expected I guess. Built-in zip drive too.

Main selling points were the ADB port (as I would have spent as much getting an iMate off ebay) and OS X Server 1.x support (something I've always wanted to delve into). So I'll throw in the HD later and get to playing

 

[agg23]

...and OS X Server 1.x support (something I've always wanted to delve into)

Rhapsody should run well on there, the only problem is you finding a (legal) copy somewhere. I've looked for it ever since I first learned about it, but it is incredibly hard to find (probably because it was so expensive). I just installed DR2 on to an x86 two days ago, and it brings back a lot of memories

Hope you have fun with your new toy.

agg23

 

[zerohour]

Maybe it's just me but I have yet to find a great use for my G3s of which I have two. Both the Indigo iMac and the beige 233 I have gather dust I have not found a task they excel at. Maybe I am just fussy or am missing something. Probably would be more practical with more memory as they both have 192 mb in them.

Have fun with your conquest hopefully you can find more of a use then I did

Ironically I still use my PowerBook 1400 as a word processor and it's only got 16mb ram just wish I could find a battery that works and doesn't cost a fortune. I am useless at soldering so a recell job is out of the question.

 

[MacJunky]

I am useless at soldering so a recell job is out of the question.

You do not want to solder tabs to the batteries anyway, you really need to spot-weld for that.

 

[protocol7]

The main motivating force for me is tinkering about with old OSes like Rhapsody and the OS X Developer Previews. I've been trying unsuccessfully for a long time to find a 8600 locally as that would be ideal for running stuff from around this period (BeOS included). For a long time I had a big gap between my 5400 (too old) and iMac (too new) which the 8600 would have filled nicely. But now with this G3 it's mostly filled as it will run from OS X Server up. Just won't handle the Developer Releases of Rhapsody or BeOS.

Something else I've been wanting to try is Descent OpenGL with my AppleJack controllers (as it added InputSprocket support along with hardware acceleration). If I can configure it to control the ship with the trackball that would be all kinds of awesome. I can now do that too as there's an ADB port on the back of this G3.

I had planned to use the hard drive out of the external that came with it (as there was none internally yet again!) but it was dead as a dodo. I then realised the sorry state of my IDE drive crop so I ended up pulling the 60GB disk I had in my modded Xbox which will go in once I unlock it. I had a 5GB Quantum Fireball which I was tempted to put in as it's still working perfectly, but man it's noisy.

 

[Unknown_K]

Beige G3's make good support machines. RAM and cheap HD's can be found for upgrades, they have built in ADB and SCSI to connect old stuff with and built in networking. I have a CDRW in my Biege G3 tower so I can burn images for older machines in the collection.

My desktop G3's tend to get some kind of PCI video capture card and are dedicated to that (Targa 2000 as an example).One of my B&W G3 with G4 upgrade houses a Matrox RTMAC setup and the other one was my main Mac (g3-400, 1GB RAM) until I recently got a Quicksiler 2002.

 

[protocol7]

Well it seems the "fun" is only just beginning. Seems I have one of the cursed Rev.1 boards so I can't get either the 60GB Maxtor or the 5GB Quantum to work properly. When I boot from the restore CD and write the restore image back to the drive it fails the checksum. Then when I try to reboot off the HD it keeps powering up and down. I have to pack it up for the night so tomorrow I'll look into this some more. I would have thought the Fireball would be old enough to not have any trouble (they even show Quantum drives in the service manual pics).

 

[Unknown_K]

Well you can only have master drives with no slaves (2 IDE drives total, one per cable)

 

[MacJunky]

That only applies to the faster bus of the Rev 1s. the slower bus that the ODD&zip were originally connected to can do dual devices.

 

[Temetka]

Well I was going to say congrat's on the B&W, I really love their case styling and bondi blue really appeals to me for some reason.

Bummer about the rev 1 mobo issue. That is what made me get rid of my B&W tower. Well that and the fact that I have a Sawtooth and a Beige G3 MT.

Hope you get the machine working. You could get a PCI IDE / SATA card and roll like that. Heck you could even get a combo card and have your firewire and USB 2.0 support.

 

[protocol7]

Well, I'm only interested in hooking up one IDE drive but even that didn't seem to want to work. I was thinking about trying to hook up the drive with an old 40-pin IDE cable to see if that limited things enough but really, what's the point in crippling the drive like that. I have a SCSI disk lying around but I'm not sure what condition it's in. Does seem the best route to take if it works. I'll give it a try later.

 

[protocol7]

Is there any particular voodoo needed to get a SCSI disk working in Mac OS? It works ok (albeit slow thanks to the old card) in my PC but I'm drawing a blank with it in the G3.

I took out the SCSI card that was in the G3 and replaced it with the one from the Gigabit Ethernet in case the card was faulty (System Profiler didn't seem to be reading the card info correctly). The drive is a WDE9180-0048A3 attached with a 68-pin cable and a 50-pin adapter on the end to connect it to the card. There are some jumpers on one end of the drive to set up SCSI ID etc. It's on SCSI 0 at the moment. There are also 4 jumpers between the power and cable but none are jumpered and I can't see what they're for.

 

[protocol7]

OK I was mistaken when i said it was working fine on the PC. Turns out I must have been plugging it into the 68-pin connection on the card (what is it with Apple only using 50-pin cards) as it's not showing up in the card utility when I use the 50-pin connection/adapter but does when going straight to the 68-pin. Must be a termination issue. So I'll go off and do some reading up on that.

In the meantime, I discovered on xlr8yourmac that it might be possible to flash a Mac bios onto the SCSI card I have in the PC (AHA-2940UW). Only thing is, I'd lose my only working PC SCSI card so I'm not keen on doing that just yet. Especially when I have 3 Mac ones already.

 

[protocol7]

I don't think this SCSI disk is in the best of shape so I'm going to knock that idea on the head. Plus it's all a mystery to me. Apple sold 68-pin drives but put in SCSI cards with 50-pin connectors. Think different indeed.

I tried connecting the Fireball with a 40-pin cable but the chime was as far as the system would boot. Quantum released fixes that would limit ATA-66 drives to ATA-33, but not for the EL series. I'm not too keen on putting in an ATA card because OS X Server is notoriously picky about hardware and there's no telling if it would work with one. And I could buy another G3 for the price of a well-used SCSI disk off eBay.

The only thing left to try is to see if I can attach the drive to the same controller as the ODD and Zip. It might just work but at what speed...

 

[Gorgonops]

In the meantime, I discovered on xlr8yourmac that it might be possible to flash a Mac bios onto the SCSI card I have in the PC (AHA-2940UW). Only thing is, I'd lose my only working PC SCSI card so I'm not keen on doing that just yet. Especially when I have 3 Mac ones already.

I have one of those cards. My *vague* understanding of the situation was that the Open Firmware version of the card had a larger capacity ROM than the PC versions and thus doing it required some serious "hackage". (Either replacing the EEPROM or using a modified version of the Mac ROM with some functionality stripped out.) Mostly I was interested in it because supposedly the Mac version of the card was usable in Sun Ultra machines, but... I pretty quickly lost interest in the Ultra 10 so the situation resolved itself. (There's only so much amusement to be had in endlessly recompiling NetBSD packages.)

Anyway... as the proud (?) owner of a Rev. 2 B&W I'll have to say that some of the weird voodoo you're seeing with IDE drives isn't confined to the early models. I forget what the laundry list was precisely, but I know I went through several drives of several brands and found issues installing OS X on about half of them. 40 GB IBM/Deskstar drives, for instance, even let me "install" on them, but on the first reboot I'd be presented with a (\) "NO!" symbol, which I'd never even seen before.

My general advice on the subject after all that is this: If you have the original cable in place jumpering the drive for "cable select" *should* work, but if you suspect a cabling problem a 40 pin cable and jumpering "master" should work. Don't use an 80 pin cable and jumper for "master", that causes strangeness and pain. Assuming your cabling layout is correct if you continue to have problems swap drives.

It's odd you're having trouble with a Maxtor, btw. That's the one brand that for me reliably worked on both the B&W and a trayload iMac. (Another machine with sketchy IDE support.) Of course, there's no rhyme or reason in it anyway, so it's probably down to the specific *drive* whether you'll see problems.

 

[protocol7]

I checked the Maxtor and Quantum drives in Powermax and they failed the short smart test so they probably weren't too reliable (even though the Quantum passed Spinrite just fine).

I ended up with a 10GB Seagate that passed it's short and long smart tests and seems in perfect shape, but it just doesn't work. I connected it with CS jumpered, split it evenly into two partitions and installed 8.5.1 onto one. When I booted into it nothing would work. System Profiler didn't have enough memory, the Appearance CP was missing some obscure thing etc. I know from reading the pages on xlr8 that WD and Seagate are known to be troublesome, but I don't have any other IDE drives left to try.

Tomorrow I'll see if I can flash my AHA-2940UW and see how far I get with the WD drive. I googled the SCSI card part numbers from the service manual and the 2940 was one of the options. I guess these 50-pin cards aren't meant for internal SCSI disks. Just funny that all 3 towers I got had em.

 

[Hrududu]

Well you can only have master drives with no slaves (2 IDE drives total, one per cable)

I've got 2 rev 1 B&W G3 systems. One has 3 internal HD's and an optical, and the other has 2 internal HD's plus internal ZIP and optical. Never had any problems with data corruption etc.

 

[protocol7]

I've got 2 rev 1 B&W G3 systems. One has 3 internal HD's and an optical, and the other has 2 internal HD's plus internal ZIP and optical. Never had any problems with data corruption etc.

Share me your secrets then

After a day of total disappointment I needed something good to happen before retiring for the night so I went ahead and tried to flash my 2940UW card with the Mac bios................... and it worked.

 

[protocol7]

Day Three.

Engineers Log.

The SCSI card flashed fine so until I unravel the mystery of non-corrupting IDE drives, I went ahead with using my old WD disk. As it was unsupported, I had to ResEdit Drive Setup to initialise it but that wasn't too hard. Installed 8.5.1 from the restore CD but on reboot it won't boot from the disk. Just the flashing system folder icon.