imac g3 dv

I picked up a imac g3 400mhz with dvd/firewire and such.

I have osx running and notice at times it's sluggish and i can hear it when it acessing the HD.
I have a new HD from a friend, and was wondering what size (as in pysical size) does this imac use. The smaller notebook type or the reguler sized ones like used in PC desktops?

I have found picture guides on how to do it, but i can't tell by the pictures what size it is and i have seen a few websites talking about this and some say its the reguler size ans one said small notebook sized.

The new drive is als a 7200 speed and some sites say this speed may get hot being this imac model is fanless.. is this true?


thanks

The HD isn't right next to the logic board so the heat will find a way to escape. A 7200 standard desktop hard drive will work, the laptop drives do not work in the older G3 models.
Be careful though, that's an older model so you can't stick any HD in there. Supposedly it will only support drives up to 128GB. I've never tried to stick one larger in there and I'd heard of some 3rd party patch kit to fix the large HD problem.
With the new HD, you will have to install 9.2 and get the latest firmware update to install 10.4.9 on it or whatever OS X release you put on it. You simply can't just install OS X because of the firmware update.
Taking apart the G3 to get to the HD is pretty simple. You should only need to remove the four bottom screws.
Let me know how things are doing. I tend to be the one answering most of the G3 iMac questions around here, so PM me if you need more assistance.
Bryan

Hi avalonmusic!

How much RAM does the iMac have? It might be a good choice to add some, it would show a boost in performance and more stability.

It has 512 of memory

Well try adding as much as you can. I believe you would see a bigger performance increase with more RAM than with a faster HD.

According to Mactracker you can have a maximum if 1GB of ram in 2 512MB sticks in your mac. And yeah it also says 128GB is the max hard drive size you can have. But as stated above the can find a 3rd party work around for this (I think).

And another thing. About updating the OS in the new hard drive. Yes you'll have to use (As stated above):

1. Install OS 9 then 9.2.2
2. Update the firmware
3. Install OS 10. It says you can update 10.4 just. But I'd try and see if 10.3 will suit your needs. As in your old mac I think it'd be the best option as it pretty quick and stable.

And one thing I noticed in my old G3 was for 10.3 to install properly it wouldn't notice a hard drive larger than 8GB. But an easy fix is to partition the hard drive into 2. The first partition is 7.99 GB and has the system on it. And the 2nd partion is the rest of your hard drive. I dunno if your machine will have this problem or not. Just letting you know. And there might be a 3rd party fix for this, but I personally didn't bother with it as a little file organisation and it ran quite ok.

[edit]This will be the page you'll need if you are to update the firmware through OS 9.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75130