Firewire PCI Beige G3 AIO

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Level 1

120 points

Firewire PCI Beige G3 AIO

I have a 266mhz Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One running Mac OS 9.2.2. I have an old Indigita IEEE 1394 PCI host adapter (aka FireWire) card that I thought I might try and install. It doesn't seem to work, as it isn't even providing any power to the ports, but looking in the Apple System Profiler, it does seem to recognize that there is a FireWire adapter in that PCI slot. But it also lists it as "pcidead,0", which I'm not sure means anything or not.

Is this card incompatible? Or is there just some missing extension or component that I need?

Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One, Mac OS 9.2.x

Posted on Jan 17, 2010 2:49 PM

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Answer 1

Limnos

Level 10

427,943 points

Jan 17, 2010 6:04 PM in response to mohaas05

Macs require cards specifically stating they are Mac compatible. General PC PCI cards usually won't work.

In rare cases a Mac card may also require a driver (I recall my Orange Micro card had an OS9 driver and was specified Mac compatible). Normally they are plug and play as long as they are specified Mac compatible.

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Answer 2

Jeff

Level 6

12,328 points

Jan 17, 2010 9:33 PM in response to mohaas05

If you ran the OS 9.2.2 Update prior to installing the FireWire card, then the required FireWire drivers (FireWire Enabler v. 2.8.5 and FireWire Support v. 2.8.5) wouldn't have been installed. You can manually extract them from the OS 9.2.2 System Update Tome (using the downloadable utility "TomeViewer") and expand them in the Extensions folder.

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Answer 3

mohaas05 Author

Level 1

120 points

Jan 17, 2010 11:17 PM in response to Jeff

Mmkay. I actually only have 9.2.1 on there right now. So I'm not sure if it makes a difference.

Either way though, I don't really have high hopes. Thanks for all the help anyways.

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Answer 4

Allan Jones

Level 9

78,194 points

Jan 18, 2010 9:01 AM in response to mohaas05

I have an old Indigita IEEE 1394 PCI host adapter (aka FireWire) card that I thought I might try and install.

Some very old FireWire cards only supported digital imaging devices--still cameras and camcorders. I have one of those bought through Apple and installed by an AASP when I got a "new" Beige G3 at work in late 1998. Worked great for the Kodak digicam but nothing else.

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