I'm currently trying to sort out my old imac G4, but can't upgrade the operating system to Snow Leopard (or even Leopard) because the disc drive no longer works. Can anyone recommend any compatible external DVD drives i could buy? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.
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iMac G4 Disc drive is Kaput!Need external Disk Drive compatible with Tiger
- Thread starter redzone
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Any Firewire DVD drive will work. Do *not* buy a USB drive. Besides the fact that USB sucks and is horribly slow compared to Firewire, USB is *not* bootable on PPC machines! It must be Firewire to boot up from it and load the OS. Aside from that, buy whatever makes you happy, they're all pretty much the same these days.
Yes, actually it will work just fine. All Fw800 devices are backwards compatible with Fw400. You just need the 6 pin <-> 9 pin cable. And most Firewire devices these days come with several different cables, so it may even be included in the box already. (If not included, these cables are like $5 on newegg, very cheap).
In fact, if he is planning to upgrade to a newer Mac at some point in the future, it might make more sense to buy the Fw800 drive now, so that it can take advantage of the faster interface speed in the future.
Lacie make some good external drives
If your feeling brave the go for a Pioneer or phillips drive and fit it internally. I put one in my G4 and it worked fine. IORAID make apple compatible drives and they are also great.
Installing it internally will not be a big job.
If your feeling brave the go for a Pioneer or phillips drive and fit it internally. I put one in my G4 and it worked fine. IORAID make apple compatible drives and they are also great.
Installing it internally will not be a big job.
You're saying your internal hard drive is okay but the internal DVD won't work? IOW the machine boots okay? I use an HP dvd1170 external dual layer dvd drive with my ancient 17" G4 PB because the internal optical drive isn't reliable. Nice thing with Tiger is no drivers are needed as the OS already has everything needed to make the drive work. Just plug in and go. Got mine from Best Buy. Now if you need a good external hard drive to boot from, just about any FW drive will work, but in my case I'm using an old Glyph drive I had (reformatted for Tiger) to boot off of.
BTW, your machine is PPC, right? Well, you're not going to be able to run Snow Leopard because Apple dropped PPC support from SL. Leopard is the lates you can run.