Hey everyone, I have an 80 gig ata hard drive sitting around and I want to install it in my imac g3. It is currently formatted in what ever windows xp/vista uses. If i install it in my imac g3 will it recognize the hard drive? I plan on installing a fresh install of panther. Also can I boot off a disk that is in a usb dvd drive with this mac?
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Will this work with my g3?
- Thread starter Macpropro80
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ATA drive should work if you set the right jumper (master vs slave vs cable select).
USB boot only on intel macs.
USB boot only on intel macs.
Though you could boot off of Firewire assuming your G3 is one of the Firewire models along with the drive.
You can put any of your macs into Firewire target mode (Press T on boot) and use it as a temporary DVD drive for the imac g3.
Be funny to use your Mac Pro as a optical drive for iMac g3...
Be funny to use your Mac Pro as a optical drive for iMac g3...
You can format and partition the drive from the system disk. Disk Utility will find it. As Consultant says, have the jumper set at Master.
installed it but all i get when I boot up is a blinking finder. I will try a swapping the original cd drive back in. (i put a dell laptop dvd drive in it)
You might not be able to boot from the Dell Laptop CD drive. Make sure it is set to Master as well (there is often a small switch near the rear of the drive) and that the CD & HD drives are attached to the separate Bus cables. (IE, don't run both off the same IDE interface cable).
The HD Bus and CD-Drive Bus are separate Buses, and as far as I recall, the Beige G3 Desktop & Tower PowerMacs and the Trayload G3 iMac can only boot OSX from a "Master" device.
Also, as already pointed out, you'll need to partition the HD with the FIRST partition being no larger than 8GB (a limitation for OSX on the TrayLoad iMac).
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The Dell Dvd drive doesnt have a switch, but Im going to stop worrying about it, this computer is more of a toy then a work horse so I don't think I will waste anymore of my time taking it apart.