PB G3 PDQ/Wallstreet CD Drive Replacement

[frdrck979]

So last year, the 20x CD-ROM drive on my Powerbook G3 PDQ 233mhz stopped working while I was trying to install 10.4 using Xpostfacto. It started when it simply wouldn't eject, but after disassembling and reassembling the drive several times it started to sort of receive power. By that I mean that it can eject and close, however the disk does not spin. I have been on the lookout for a replacement drive for some time now however they seem to only be getting more expensive as time goes on. Essentially, I am wondering what options I have to replace the interal drive.

While I have considered an external SCSI drive or a using a Firewire drive connected via a Cardbus adapter, I'm not sure if I can boot a Wallstreet/PDQ via Firewire Cardbus, and I feel like an external drive would defeat the purpose of having a laptop with an internal CD drive and potentially be too expensive for a temporary measure until I find a replacement module. However, I am not entirely opposed to the idea since I probably wouldn't be installing any software while travelling, though It would make it more difficult to play CDs or games with audio tracks on it due to the need for another outlet available to power the drive.

Now I have heard of people replacing the drive in a Pismo or Lombard with that of a PC laptop since they both use the same ATA bus, however I haven't't seen anyone do this with a Wallstreet/PDQ, I'm pretty sure they they have different connectors, and I don't know what the internals of the CD drive of a later model G3 look like and am yet to find any teardowns of the mechanism itself. Now I do also have the CD drive from a 1400 that I am willing to use for this, but I not sure about the comparability of the internals on that one either So I suppose my second question would be: Is it possible to replace the CD-ROM drive or mechanism with that of a PC laptop, or am I stuck with a finding the entire module?

 

[Ortho'sDeli]

I think I have a spare drive I'd let go. I'll have to see if I can get out to my storage tomorrow.

 

[dankcomputing]

I'm in this same boat. My CD drive just died. The drives are not anything normal or even abnormal that I've seen on other laptops even of the era so far. The Lombard/Pismo modules just use ordinary JAE connectors, these use a proprietary form factor where the module connector is connected straight to the drive control board via 2 26-pin FFC cables. It's odd that there's so few third-party Wallstreet modules but from the looks of this maybe not, maybe it's not possible to easily drop a later JAE drive into the space that this mechanism takes up. Electrically it should all be IDE though.

 

[dankcomputing]

Apparently a company called MCE made some third-party drives but they're so rare they might as well not exist. They almost certainly would have been standard JAE-IDE drives in a compatible frame. 1400 and 3400 drives are also a no-go.

I have a hunch that a Japanese company might have made one too but they'd only show up on YAJ if they existed.

 

[dankcomputing]

Oh and before you get the thought of hacking in the interposer board from one of the comparatively far more numerous ZIP and LS-120 drives for Wallstreet systems, the optical JAE-IDE pinout and the removable hard drive JAE-IDE pinout are completely different.

Still, this could be the start of a project to get JAE-IDE drives working in Wallstreets. The JAE connectors are findable but the connector going into the Mac might have to be recovered from a dead drive.

 

[dankcomputing]

I got a chance to look inside a DVD drive and they are very, very similar. The faceplates are fully interchangeable. The rails and metal shell look identical. The interposer board and connections to it also appear to be the same. Only the actual drive optics, ribbon cabling, and associated control board are different.

Also, after testing a variety of different SSD solutions I have found that my CD drive is actually "working". What's actually happening is very strange. Depending on what SSD is installed, the CD drive exhibits different misbehavior ranging from not showing up at all in the system profiler to refusing to read some discs. This makes zero sense as the ultrabay drives are on a separate IDE channel, but that's what's happening. Every SSD I have tried bigger than a 32GB CompactFlash causes this misbehavior. So far I have tried a 64GB CF, 128GB CF, a 128GB SD on the common SD-IDE adapters, a 128GB mSATA SSD on the cheap common bridge and the same SSD on the expensive AbleConn bridge. The CD drive worked properly with none of them. I even tried the ZuluIDE but that just froze the system during boot. (It also doesn't fit properly.)

So far the DVD drive doesn't have this problem; I'll have to test further. Upon investigation, it should be possible to design an adapter that would allow the use of JAE-IDE drives, it would just need some 3D printed parts and custom PCBs designed.