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Mac Mini G4 Superdrive Upgrade

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dollydolman

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 16, 2008
17
0
Hello, I'm new here but I hope you can help me all the same, I have a Mac Mini G4 and have taken out the Combo Drive and put in a Superdrive in it's place. Tiger doesn't seem to be recognizing it in the system profiler and I don't dare put a disc in to try it out because it will probably just stay in there. The new drive is a Panasonic UJ-845C, says manufactured to Apple specifications on the front. I have tried looking at the Open Firmware but that doesn't seem to do what I want. Now do I need press some other key combination on start-up, is it something software based or do I have to install some new drivers of some sort.

It is of course possible that it is a faulty drive, but I'm hoping that it is just down to something I haven't done.

Thanks in advance.
 
Did you put the ribbon cable in all the way? When you reboot does it make a sound? Was the superdrive working before you installed it?
 
The Mac Mini uses an ATA interposer card rather than cables, the old Combo drive it replaced is recognized perfectly but it seems unable to recognize this one.
 
dollydolman said:
The Mac Mini uses an ATA interposer card rather than cables, the old Combo drive it replaced is recognized perfectly but it seems unable to recognize this one.
Click to expand...

Where did you get the new one from. As was it working before you installed it in your mini?
 
Ebay, from a powerseller and proper business so it should have been OK, but I don't know. Looking closer at it it was manufactured 3 years ago so I presume that it has been in storage since then which is worrying.
 
dollydolman said:
Ebay, from a powerseller and proper business so it should have been OK, but I don't know. Looking closer at it it was manufactured 3 years ago so I presume that it has been in storage since then which is worrying.
Click to expand...

Does it make a noise when you power up the mini?
 
Yep you can hear the drive do a kind of test spin just after the start-up chime, but silence after that and it isn't recognized in any programs. The power seems to be getting through well enough, the connector looks clean but haven't got around to dusting it off yet, that could possibly come up with results but I don't know. When the OS is installed does it only install drivers for the particular hardware that is in the Mac at the time?
 
dollydolman said:
Yep you can hear the drive do a kind of test spin just after the start-up chime, but silence after that and it isn't recognized in any programs. The power seems to be getting through well enough, the connector looks clean but haven't got around to dusting it off yet, that could possibly come up with results but I don't know. When the OS is installed does it only install drivers for the particular hardware that is in the Mac at the time?
Click to expand...

Does it show up in system profiler?
 
Yeah the old combo works, the weird thing is that I just stuck in the Tiger install disc and it actually span up as though it was going to do something, but then didn't lol. It still isn't working, I have sent a message to the business I got it from on eBay, if they don't have any ideas I'm asking for a replacement or a refund.

It is probably more sensible to buy a new one, I love the current iMacs, but it's always more of a project upgrading an old one.

P.S: Any idea how to get a stuck disc out? lol
 
It's out thanks to a nail file lol, none of those ways would have worked because it didn't recognize the drive, tried all of them before then anyway lol. Anyway thanks for all of your help, it is getting sent back to the seller soon for a refund.

You will probably see me around here, I like the forums.
 
anyone else ?...

So I could have been the seller of that transaction. I sell UJ-835's and UJ-845's all the time to customers. They test fine when they leave the shop and they test fine when they return to the shop. The customer have that problem, it just doesn't show up in the system profiler. My guess is that it is OS related something about when the OS was installed only the driver that was specific to the drive present was installed ?... any thoughts to that ? I had the problem also with a customer that had a iMac 1.83 intel, I replaced the drive with a UJ-846, then I tried UJ-857, then UJ-875 none of them would show up in the profiler. Other thought do certain drives require a minimum OS ? Is there a driver utility that can check what's installed and what's supported. Any thoughts please.....
 
Found the answer....

So it appears that UJ-845 pulled from other mac products and put into mac mini don't work because of master/slave conflict. In order to get UJ-845 to work in mac mini the work around is to change the jumpers on your harddrive to slave as pulled UJ-845 firmware is set to master. And the once pulled from MacMini would have been originally slave. Anyone know how to mod the UJ-845 into slave ?
 
gooffer said:
Anyone know how to mod the UJ-845 into slave ?
Click to expand...
Usually with the old PATA laptop optical drives to change it to slave (or cable select) requires a firmware change, sometimes it's available from the manufacturer and other times there are modified firmwares available on the internet.

Unfortunately as the Apple drives use custom firmware, it won't be available from the manufacturer and you aren't likely to find modified firmwares for it either. Even the standard modified firmware would likely be very difficult to get hold of.
 
ok how about

changing the HD to slave, had a good conversation with Larry from OWC yesterday seems like the mod of the superdrive firmware is a little too far out there. But changing HD to slave would be the easiest fix, as I doubt the firmwares are custom on them and a jumper just needs to be set like on the larger 3.5 drives. Now drives with apple logo on them do not show the jumper settings but the googling the original markers drive specs should work....
 
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