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[abundantmussel]

Picked up a G4 Sawtooth last night, its 450Mhz, 256MB, ATi Rage 128 pro and a SCSI card. Not bad for €20.

Pulled the old 20GB HD out and stuck in 2 80GB HDs and installed Mac OS X Tiger. Added a USB ralink WiFi dongle also.

One question I have is has anyone any experience in flashing a PNY Geforce 6200 AGP card? If so will this card work with Mac OS X? I ask as I pulled the 2 HDs from a celeron box I have that I pulled the PSU and RAM out of years ago and saw the GPU. So i figure if it'll flash i may as well.

Plan is to put Mac OS 9 on the second 80GB HD. Bump the RAM to 2GB and maybe swap the HDs for SSD.

 

[jbarley]

I've not flashed a 6200 myself, but I do run a flashed Geforce 6200 in my G4 Cube running Leopard and it works well.
I purchased this card already flashed from Ebay.

 

[abundantmussel]

The poor G4 Sawtooth I bought is no more, I've replaced the 2 x 80GB HDs with a 20GB one and had to pull the GPU out of it.

The reason for this, I went to pick up 2 17" monitors last night and the guy had an MDD sitting under a table, I asked about it and he gave it to me for nothing, he said it wouldn't boot it just hung on the grey apple screen.

Got it home, stuck in the 2 80GB drives along side the factory 80GB. Booted it up with my Tiger Disk and it hung on the grey boot screen. Pulled it open and spotted the problem straight away.

Pulled out the GPU and put the Rage 128 Pro from the Sawtooth in, booted it up using my Tiger Disk and it worked this time, cloned the Disk image from the Sawtooth drive over the factory drive and then put both 80GB drives from the Sawtooth into a RAID on the other controller in the MDD.

Machine is working away perfectly now, might try re-pasting the GPU from the MDD and replacing the screws with the correct ones and see if there is life left in it.

Very happy with my free MDD. 1.25GHz and 1GB RAM.

 

[flyrod]

That might be the problem right there... I wonder what the story behind that was. Maybe a 5 year old or an 85 year old?

 

[abundantmussel]

Its the Irish solution, put a few screws in it. Some of things I've seen over here, I bought a machine a few years back that had been used by a farmer in a barn, opened it up when it started smoking and found straw in the heatsink that was burning.

 

[MagicBoy]

I did have a Rage 128 in my PC when they first came out. After a few months the GPU died. Opened the PC to test the card ... and the heatsink was sat on the floor of the case having fallen off!

 

[eyoungren]

The poor G4 Sawtooth I bought is no more, …

No, no, no!

You can run that Sawtooth headless! That is to say, without a video card. It will boot and work just as well as without one. You just need to setup a VNC server (I suggest OSXVNC) that loads at boot time. Then you could use the MDD to control it via VNC.

That's exactly what I do with our G4/350 here at work. It's our Applescript server and it has no video card.

 

[abundantmussel]

No, no, no!

You can run that Sawtooth headless! That is to say, without a video card. It will boot and work just as well as without one. You just need to setup a VNC server (I suggest OSXVNC) that loads at boot time. Then you could use the MDD to control it via VNC.

That's exactly what I do with our G4/350 here at work. It's our Applescript server and it has no video card.

Not a bad idea but I think the plan is replace the MDD GPU and put the Rage 128 back in the Sawtooth and use that for Mac OS 9, just have to find somewhere to place it as my office is filling up rapidly, on my desk at the moment I have a 20" iMac g5, next to it a 17" hooked to the MDD, my 2006 Macbook Pro, then a 30" Cinema Display, another 17" monitor hooked to a Debian box and then another 17" hooked to a raspberry pi, it is rapidly getting out of hand.

 

[abundantmussel]

Just picked up an MDD and a QS for €20. MDD has a dead PSU but the case etc is in much better condition then my other one so I think I'll swap out the PSU. The QS, I'll probably up the RAM and leave it as is. So my Sawtooth can now have its GPU back. The MDD has a sound card and 2 USB cards and a GPU also, no hard drives in either but I have some 80GBs in my MDD I can use.

 

[abundantmussel]

Just finished moving the PSU from my old MDD to the new one, moving drives around, putting the Sawtooth GPU back and installing OS's. I have ended up with:

1. G4 Sawtooth - 450MHz, 256MB RAM, 20GB HD, ATi Rage 128 Pro 16MB, Startech 10/100/1000 Card, MacOS 9.2.2
2. G4 QS - 733MHz, 1.25GB RAM, 80GB HD, Nvidia Geforce 2 MX 32MB, Airport Card, SCSI Card, USB2 Card, MacOS X 10.4.11
   
3. G4 MDD - 2 x 1.25GHz, 2GB RAM, 80GB HD, Nvidia Geforce 4 MX 64MB, Airport Card, SCSI Card, USB2 Card, MacOS X 10.4.11

I might move the MDD to MacOS X 10.5.8 not sure yet.