W & B motherboard rev 1 & 2 ?

Yup there was a rev 1 and a rev 2 board. The main visible difference on the board is the rev 2 uses a different IDE controller marked 402. Lowendmac has the details here, http://lowendmac.com/ppc/blue-white-power-mac-g3.html and a photos here,
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G3-ZONE/yosemite/newfeatures.html

Kevin

The rev 1 Blue & White G3 has a tragic flaw. When its single Hard Drive (the rev 1 does not support two drives) is replaced with a drive FASTER than the original 4, 6, or 8 GB drive, or larger than about 40 GB, it starts making subtle errors in disk transfers. This makes it flaky. Unreliable. It starts making Un-reproduceable errors. Crashes. Freezes. Disk corruption. Never the same thing twice, and never so often that you can catch it.

Some have referred to it as the "HeartBreaker G3".

An add-on PCI card for SCSI or ATA drives solves the problem, but if you have not yet bought one, skip the Rev 1 motherboard.

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:
The rev 1 Blue & White G3 has a tragic flaw. When its single Hard Drive (the rev 1 does not support two drives) is replaced with a drive FASTER than the original 4, 6, or 8 GB drive, or larger than about 40 GB, it starts making subtle errors in disk transfers. This makes it flaky. Unreliable. It starts making Un-reproduceable errors. Crashes. Freezes. Disk corruption. Never the same thing twice, and never so often that you can catch it.

Some have referred to it as the "HeartBreaker G3".

I have a G3/400 and think that all 400MHz CPU machines have the later version DMA chip that allows 48 bit sector addressing. If your is too, you may want to be looking at speedtools2 or the ATA High-cap software.
http://www.speedtools2.com/ATA6.html

My question is, how can you confirm this on the G3/400? I have seen how to do it on the G3/350 (controller chip inspection). How about the G3/400?

The process is the same for all revisions -- inspect the controller chip looking at its part number markings. The CMD646 chip used on the Rev 1 is the flaky one, the CMD646-402 used on the Rev 2 is the "fixed" one.

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G3-ZONE/yosemite/newfeatures.html

For the chip location photo, look at 3. Revised IDE Controller Chip

" I have a G3/400 and think that all 400MHz CPU machines have the later version DMA chip that allows 48 bit sector addressing."

I have a pair of 400 MHz B&W G3s that shipped with the Rev. 1 motherboard, but my 450 MHz B&W does have the Rev. 2 motherboard. In terms of improvements, the Rev. 2 IDE controller chip merely corrected a programming error, so it can't be considered technology-forward. The older beige G3s have IDE controllers that reliably support drives larger than 40 GBs (up to 128 GBs), and drive RPM isn't a problem. As for the B&W G3s, neither the first nor the revised IDE controller chip supports 48-bit Logical Block Addressing, needed for large drive (128 GBs+ ->)support. That didn't occur until the 2002 G4 Quicksilver models.

Jeff wrote:
I have a pair of 400 MHz B&W G3s that shipped with the Rev. 1 motherboard, but my 450 MHz B&W does have the Rev. 2 motherboard. In terms of improvements, the Rev. 2 IDE controller chip merely corrected a programming error, so it can't be considered technology-forward. The older beige G3s have IDE controllers that reliably support drives larger than 40 GBs (up to 128 GBs), and drive RPM isn't a problem. As for the B&W G3s, neither the first nor the revised IDE controller chip supports 48-bit Logical Block Addressing, needed for large drive (128 GBs+ ->)support.

However, if you've got the revised controller on your G3, you can use the Speedtools version2 utility from Intech or their tool (sold separately, unbundled) called Hi-Cap to extend the addressing of a drive beyond 128GB.

I tried it on my old G3 B/W 400MHz CPU that I'm setting up as a backup 'server' on a pair of 500GB ATA drives. Worked great on OS X 10.4.11. Highly recommended! Installation was easy but you will need separate partitions and your OS X installed in the <128GB partition. Their instructions are abundantly clear and the web site details show that.
<a class="jive-link-external-small" href="http://">http://speedtools.com/

Good point - the Rev. 2 IDE controller supports Intech's software workaround for a less expensive solution for large drive recognition. When I pulled the 9 GB SCSI drive from my first 400 MHz Rev. 1 B&W, I decided to go with a hardware solution. The system is noticeably faster with the Sonnet ATA-133 controller card that I installed, compared to my 450 MHz Rev. 2 B&W with the hard drive connected to the onboard IDE controller.

Unfortunately I found the machine incapable of network backup in Retrospect v6.1.230, running 10.4.11, despite all my efforts. Retro forum's users don't use G3s anymore, so no help there. Any suggestions for a hanging app?

I tried comparing the Ethernet port connection with FW port connections direct to the machine but no-go. Scans but doesn't execute the backup, SWOD (spinning wheel of death) occurs and freezes the progress of the backup.