02-05-2007, 09:40 PM

Well first of all I'm not exactly sure where to put this thread so I decided to post it here.


Anyways, I have a Revision D iMac Tray Loader machine. It has a 333MHz G3, 256 RAM and the other default Apple whatnots. Anyways I recently decided to replace the IDE cable in there to a new ATA-100 one, and it seemed a bit quicker, but anyways what I can't do now is use the CD drive. It isn't showing in the system profiler, it won't boot from any CD and it won't recognize anything. Is this because of the cable i replaced?

Any ideas or suggestions are welcome.


Thanks, Jaimy.

02-05-2007, 10:41 PM

G'day redhat9 & welcome to Mac-Forums.

The CD drive would be IDE that's why it isn't recognised. i wasn't aware that you could swap over an IDE cable to a ATA-100 unless your HD matched. Did you also change over your HD recently too?

When I recently upgraded my PC, just about everything had to go, except my 2 IDE HD's. My new motherboard took mainly SATA drives but had 2 connections allocated for the older IDE's. Well one went to my DVD/CD drive and the other was a toss up between my two IDE's ... in the end they swapped one for a SATA drive at no extra cost.

So I can only presume that your CD drive can't run from an ATA-100 cable.

02-05-2007, 10:50 PM

The CD drive in this old clunker is a SCSI one. And the drive is a 15 GB WD, usually they run at ATA-100 or so. I thought that you could use an ATA-100 cable on ATA-33 through ATA-100, that it doesn't matter.


But the main problem is that the drive doesn't seem to work. It is powered up, but won't work.

02-05-2007, 10:52 PM

Is the clunker attached to the new cable too? Or have you only changed over the WD's cable ... sorry if they're stoopid Q's, but I have to ask them.

02-06-2007, 12:34 AM

The CD drive is still attached to the SCSI cable, thats all that it can be connected by. The WD is on the ATA-100 cable.

By changing this cable, did this by any chance make the SCSI CD drive non functioning?

02-06-2007, 12:44 AM

put all the original cables back in and see if it works...if not you have a bit of a bigger problem on your hands...

if they arent working i would suggest you double and tripple check all of your connections to make sure you didnt knock something loose which looks plugged in but actually isnt....report back after this
-chris

02-06-2007, 03:45 PM

So I ended up replacing the original IDE cable and now the CD drive works. I'm guessing this was becuase the cable I had in there had 3 connectors and the original one has 2, because of this it bypasses the SCSI CD drive and attempts to look for a CD device on the IDE chain.