Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 12:02:37 -0600 From: Scott Birdwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I have a question regarding my G3/300 Mini-tower. I have upgraded this to G4 500 with 768 meg ram and am looking to upgrade my hard-drive status. I currently am running the stock 4 gig scsi HD that shipped with this unit. I believe that I have a Rev A version of ROM which, apparently, will not allow a slave drive HD (apparently even on the IDE CD-ROM bus).
First, be sure of what you have. Open Apple System Profiler. Near the bottom of the page there should be an item labeled "Production Information". Click on the caret if it is not already opened and look at the item labeled "ROM Revision".
Rev. A is $77D.40F5 (I'm a little uncertain about the 5 there. Might be a 2.)
Rev. B is $77D.45F1
Rev. C is $77D.45F2
If you have either of the latter two, then you have slave support.
In OSX, you will have slave support because OSX loads a different driver or firmware for the IDE busses. I think you still can't boot off of a slave in OSX, but the slave drives do show up after you've launched OSX.
My first question is regarding the use of a PCI ATA card in this system. Does the "no slave drive" rule apply to the PCI cards,
No.
as well? My second question is concerning the ROM. Will replacing my Rev A with a Rev B or C allow me to use a slave drive
Yes. But, the IDE controller in the Beige G3 is 16.7 MB/s IDE. It's not very fast. Modern hard drives will outrun its capabilities. The stock hard drive in the Beige probably delivers about 8 - 12 MB/s so it's fine on that bus. A modern ATA133 drive will deliver about 40 MB/s sustained reads and writes so you want at least an ATA66 bus to take advantage of its abilities.
Jeff Walther
-- PCI-PowerMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and...
Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- Sonnet & PowerLogix Upgrades - start at $169 | & CDRWs on Sale! |
Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html>
PCI-PowerMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/pci-powermacs.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive:<http://www.mail-archive.com/pci-powermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/>
Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
