switching dvd drives on mac mini

I have 2 mac minis. One is an older G4model with a super drive. The newer one is a intel based model but it only has a combo drive. How hard would it be to swap these drives. I really don't need the dvd burner on the g4 since it is used as a media center pc. The intel I plan to do some basic video editing on then burn them to dvds. I really dont want to have to buy an external dvd burner.

jdevleerjr said:

I have 2 mac minis. One is an older G4model with a super drive. The newer one is a intel based model but it only has a combo drive. How hard would it be to swap these drives. I really don't need the dvd burner on the g4 since it is used as a media center pc. The intel I plan to do some basic video editing on then burn them to dvds. I really dont want to have to buy an external dvd burner.

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The hardest part (which isnt hard) is opening the cases to have a look! There is an alternative though why not fire up the old computer in Target mode and use its DVD. If they were mine though I would open them both and have a look!

You may or may not run into problems with just swapping the drives, I don't really know. I've never tried it, nor have I ever heard of anyone trying it. But, there's a couple of things that you're going to need to look into (or find out the hard way after opening both of them up):
-Are both drives the same interface standard? Some new optical drives (including, I think, some slim drives) are running off a SATA interface. It wouldn't be implausible for Apple to have switched from IDE to SATA when they swapped to PC hardware...
-What about firmware? There are some desktop PC drives that will drop right in and work on a Mac (a bunch of Lite-Ons, various Pioneers, etc.) but I'm not sure how a drive that was set up to boot on an Open Firmware system will deal with talking to an EFI system... there's a good chance that it could work just fine, but there's a chance that it may just refuse to talk to the drive.

Have you looked around to see if anyone has tried this before?

The two are 100% compatable. Go to macsales.com
You can buy one for $100. Sometimes they also have directions on how do this stuff yourself.
-Peace

I guess the thing to do is just do the swap. Both are IDE so maybe its a few hour project on the weekend for me. I have opened up the mini's case before to upgrade the ram. I just didn't know if the firmware would be different or not. Thanks for your help.