iMac G3 333 "Blueberry" tray load

[jbmx4life]

Is it possible to put a slot-load cd-rom/combo drive into an older tray load model? I am beginning to think that my tray-load has seen its better days as it take forever to read a CD and sounds aweful in the process. I know that these are older drives and read at 24x.

I realized that the tray-load cd-rom has an adapter on the back of it. Would I just be able to purchase a different cd-rom/cd-rw/dvd-rom/dvd-rw or does it have to be something that is APPLE specific? Is it something in the firmware of the drive that makes the system recognize the drive itself?


TIA,
J

 

[jbmx4life]

Well I decided to experiment last night.I did try to use a standard PC optical cd-rom drive. I didn't have a molex Y-adapter but I made my own and then I used a 2-head IDE cable.I had everything out in the open (i.e. tray not installed into the back of iMac). I tried 2 different cd-roms and neither of them worked. All I got when I had them hooked up was a grey screen with a folder flashing a "?" and the Mac OS face.

J

 

[jbmx4life]

Well a good samaritan sent me a tray-load cd-rom for the cost of shipping. Everything is working properly until....

I can get OS X 10.3 fully loaded on the hard drive but then it reboots and won't load the OS. Instead it goes right for the OS cd. I tried taking the cd out and it sits with the folder flashing the ? and face. I tried using the cd to force it to boot from the hard drive and it does the same. I used the Disk Utility on the OS X cd to check out the hard drive and it says that everything is fine and that OS X 10.3 is loaded on to the hard drive. WTF IS THE PROB NOW?!?! Sheesh this thing is driving me nutz. I have tried twice to load the OS and got the same result both times.

Help me,
J

 

[jbmx4life]

I got it working! The problem was that I had put the jumper into the hard drive in the "Master" position. There is a Western Digital 6GB hard drive in the iMac. When you do that on the Western Digital hard drives it makes the PC/Mac think that there is supposed to be another drive and it will keep searching for it instead of using the hard drive that is already in place. I removed the jumper completely which sets the hard drive to "Master/Single Drive". I had removed the jumper when I was doing my other experimentation with the PC optical drive but even then I think that it was just in a storage position.

I played around with OS X last night after I got the iMac working and it seems pretty fun. I only have 160mb of RAM installed but it wasn't too laggy. Now I am thinking about some upgrades since I know everything is functional for sure. I have found a G4 (466 I think) CPU card upgrade for $159. Would you guys recommend this? I am going to try and find 2*256mb of RAm for it and that should really help OS X. I am also planning on putting in a 40+GB hard drive that is 7200RPM and with an 8MB cache to help speed up that process. LMK what you guys think about those options.


Jeremy