Internal CD-RW

[bngbrgr]

Hi, I'm looking for an internal CD-RW drive for my G4 400 (Yikes!), and I was wondering what kind I should get and which ones are bootable. I'm looking at the Lite-On 48x24(<--i think)x48. It does not specify if it is mac compatible. Is it? I it is, is it bootable?

Thanks

 

[MacsRgr8]

That could be difficult.
I think the CD (or DVD) needs an Apple ROM. This is because whenever a Mac wants to boot off a device (anything, also internal HD) it loads the driver for that device with it.
I admit I'm not 100% sure on this, but I'm pretty sure that if you want a Macintosh bootable ATAPI CD drive, it must be an Apple drive....
A local dealer with a spare part left over? Say a left over combo from a broken QuickSilver?

I wish you good luck!

 

[macfreek57]

i bought a dvd atapi drive from a friend. It's DIRECTLY out of an HP pc and it is 100% bootable. I even have it in an external firewire drive bay (because i have an iMac) and I've installed OS X from it. to my knowledge, pc drives will work fine with macs.
the reason that MacsRgr8 is thinking there may be problems, i think, is that macs used to need Apple ROM's installed on them to be bootable. since steve jobs came back, macs have become insreasingly less "proprietary". Also, you do need to be sure that if you are installing a drive in an external drive bay, the bay itself needs to have the ability to boot on a mac. (mine does)

 

[MacsRgr8]

Hey macfreek57, that's gr8 news!

Good thing you pointed out there.

Just came to mind... maybe its the new Firmware which has made this possible... hmmm. You can load drivers from firmware to RAM...

 

[cubist]

No. ATA drives (also known as IDE drives) do not need any firmware or ROM changes to work in present-day Macs. They generally do not need any drivers either. They are simply generic devices.

You people are remembering Apple's old SCSI implementation. Because SCSI devices have a device manufacturer and type visible to the host, Apple used this to implement a kind of protection racket. This resulted in a market for third-party drivers such as Anubis, and a lot of wasted time and aggravation. It was stupid and shortsighted.

ATA is a crappier hardware design than SCSI, but it doesn't expose any such labelling, so the protection racket is no longer possible. Attach any hard drive, CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD-ROM or whatever to your Mac, and it will work.

 

[MacsRgr8]

Still Apple needs to load the drivers for the disk. Maybe it's on the HFS+ partition?

 

[MacsRgr8]

Boot sequence

Here's a good read about the boot sequence of new world Macs.