Powermac G3 Ide Controller Issue

Hello all,

Have a few questions here. Just got my hands on two g3s blue and whites, with rev 1 boards. I am awhere of the issue with the ide controller on these mboards whre it has data corruption. I am curious what the extent of this data corruption is, that is what actually could happen. The reason i ask is that i have installed panther on the hard drive 3 times now, and i unplug the the power over night. When i come back the next day, the machine starts up with the apple logo, but then gives me a circle with a line through it. Assuming this means the os has been corrupted/damaged. Now i would have to assume this is the end result of the ide controller issue.

The other issue i am having is with cdroms on tha same controller and i am wondering if the controller is causing this too. The apple cdrom works fine, i can boot panther and use the cdrom within the os. I have tried two other brand/models and i cannot boot panther from them at all.

I know purchasing a new ata card (acard and sonnet sell them on newegg for a good price, so it is worth it) will fix the data corruption problem, but does anyone know if it will help the compatibility of the cdroms? I would think it might since it has alot to do with the controller on compatability not the os when booting from a cdrom.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks

If the CD still works it may be a bad hard drive. I think it is still fixing it b/c the g3's are great choice if U plan to do a lot of upgrades. Get a serial ATA card,boots your comuters memory and install panter again and you will be fine (I hope)

Good luck!

macEfan said:

If the CD still works it may be a bad hard drive. I think it is still fixing it b/c the g3's are great choice if U plan to do a lot of upgrades. Get a serial ATA card,boots your comuters memory and install panter again and you will be fine (I hope)

Good luck!

Click to expand...

Not sure when you say "I think it is still fixing it" whats fixing what? The thing is the the original cdrom boots panther but not my other two. I was hoping to upgrade the cdrom since the old one is kinda of loud.

The hard drive i have is not serial ata but i do have the adapter, but that wont fit because the drives are so close to the hinges. But i may be inclined to get a serial ata hard drive, or maybe even take my 36 gig raptor and put this 60 gig into my pc, but i dont see how a 10000rpm hard drive is going to live to its potential in a 6 year old computer.

I think a new controller card will be good for putting in anothere cdrom. Does apple automatically detect on boot the cdrom drive to boot from? I have always seen pcs giving guff to people since ide controllers are kinda outsiders.

I think the hard drive is fine, i bought it as an external hard drive, one witrh usb and firewire and preferred to use the hd itself inside a computer. I used it to transfer files and the hd itself has not gotten much use, so i have to assume it is the the controller, but i may also plug the hd in my windows and see what happens after a week.

Later

I have been reading around and it seems there are to possible issues. One is that the ide controller will not work with many hard drives after the time of this machine. Also, another guy on the net said he had to partition his hd to the 8 gig for os format, even though he is not nesecerally have to do that, but he said he has issues with the data corruption issue if he does not do this, but it is unclear if he had a rev 1 or 2 board.

I thought i might try that, partitioning the hd to 8/52 gigs, and see if it fails after a day or two. If it doesn, obvious choice is to buy a new card. I think i may do the swap and put my sata hd from my pc into this one, just because it is fun and over the last year i have been downgrading my pc to purchase more stuff on my g5.

The thing i am really hoping for is that if i get this new controller card, my cdroms will be able to boot.

later

knemonic said:

The thing i am really hoping for is that if i get this new controller card, my cdroms will be able to boot.

Click to expand...

Check the compatibility database on www.xlr8yourmac.com to see if your CD drives are bootable. The IDE issues on Rev.1 BWs, as fas as I know, was limited to HDs so if the drives are compatible you should be able to boot from them without the add-on card. That said, get the ATA card. It is worth it.

Good luck

G3 Problems

Hi,
I have a Blue G3 as well, and its rev. 1. Well Maybe someone here can help me, I want to know if a PC IDE controller card will work?
Thanks

somorastik said:

Hi,
I have a Blue G3 as well, and its rev. 1. Well Maybe someone here can help me, I want to know if a PC IDE controller card will work?
Thanks

Click to expand...

Yes it will but make sure it's OSX and Mac compatible. There is a company called OWC that sells PCI IDE cards that will work.

http://www.macsales.com/

The last G3 I worked on had a Rev. 1 motherboard. There was data corruption when I ran two hard drives. And for some bizarre reason I had to set the 80 Gb
Hard drive that I wanted to boot off of to slave and the original Hard drive to master. Then OS X installed on the slave. It all worked but it had would crash about once every other day. I eventually bought a REV 2 board (i think it was $50) and re arranged the jumper setting