G3 imac cdrom (Mac newbie)

[lotas]

Good morning. i just got my first mac, a G3 333 iMac running OS 8.6, and the cdrom drive in it is dead. im just trying to find out what type is it? i heard its one out of a Powerbook, but which one? i have also heard that a USB cdrom drive will work, but will it boot from CD? im getting extra memory and installing Panther soon, but need to boot from CD for this to work. i had an idea of taking the cdrom drive out, changing the hard drive cable to have 2 connectors off it and then putting a power splitter so i can put in a normal cdrom drive in. anyone tried this? would the mac support 2 IDE devices like this?
Thanks in advance.

 

[zarknl]

I have the same mac, it is a matsushita CR-175-D ATAPI IDE laptop type drive.

Other laptop drives will probably work too if they have the same interface and size.

Good luck,

Zarknl.

Good morning. i just got my first mac, a G3 333 iMac running OS 8.6, and the cdrom drive in it is dead. im just trying to find out what type is it? i heard its one out of a Powerbook, but which one? i have also heard that a USB cdrom drive will work, but will it boot from CD? im getting extra memory and installing Panther soon, but need to boot from CD for this to work. i had an idea of taking the cdrom drive out, changing the hard drive cable to have 2 connectors off it and then putting a power splitter so i can put in a normal cdrom drive in. anyone tried this? would the mac support 2 IDE devices like this?
Thanks in advance.

 

[lotas]

thanks for the info, but i just found out a major hack on the imac. read this (http://blog.lotas-smartman.net/archives/001120.php#001120) blog post. basicly im taking the hard drive out, putting in a different ide cable (with 3 connectors, not 2 (board and hdd in case you think im miscounting)) and splitting the power. so i can then have a standard ide drive mounted (probably) outside the case. this is a kind of messy way of doing it, but in theory it should work. i have seen others do this, and i cant see why not!
Thanks for the info about what type it is though. the closet i found to it will cost me about 300 euro so im guessing this is my best option.

 

[HopperJonusFang]

Another thing you should consider is upgrading your RAM.
I know I'm not one to talk with just 128Mb at the moment, but I don't think Panther will like 32Mb although I'm no expert can anyone back me up on this?

 

[lotas]

its actually got 288mb ram now. upgraded a while back. getting an other 256mb dimm. tried it in both slots so no problem in it taking it. so ill max it out at 512 pretty cool.

 

[imstillatwork]

how should the drives be jumpered to do this? cable select does not work, master slave does not seem to work either... anyone?