Power Mac G3 H*ll

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Power Mac G3 H*ll

Alright, I'm trying to convert an old power mac g3 Blue and White into a server for my web projects. The only problem it had was that the current hard drive was broken. So I took out the SCSI hard drive and decided to use the IDE hard drive I already owned. I plugged it in using the existing IDE cable by resting it on top of the CD drive and plugging it into both. But that didn't work. I learned that the motherboard in it (a revision 1 motherboard) can't support IDE drives on the built in IDE controller. So I bought a mac compatible IDE PCI card, this one

http://www.acard.com/english/fb01-product.jsp?prodno=AEC-6280M&type1_title=Adapters&idnono=124

And when I plugged the cd player and the hard drive into this pci card, it didn't work, at all. If I try and boot from a mac os 8.5 boot cd with the player plugged into the pci card, it doesn't work.

If I boot the computer in open firmware and go through the device tree I can find the pci card, and when I get it's properties it says "pci-ide" so I know this is it, but it doens't show the HD or the CD player is connected to this pci card. I'm at a loss, and IDK what to do. I have an idea that it's software and the computer can't recognize the card and drivers need to be installed or something, but I can't figure that out either. Thank you for any and all help.

Power Mac G3 Blue and White, Mac OS 8.6 or Earlier

Posted on Feb 20, 2010 9:51 PM

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Answer 1

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Don Archibald

Level 10

101,623 points

Feb 20, 2010 10:37 PM in response to patrickgates

Hi, Patrick -

Did you reset any of the jumpers on the drives?

In order for the optical drive to be bootable, it should be set to Master. That means the hard drive, if sharing the same bus as the optical drive, should be set to Slave. The B&W G3s do not handle Cable Select jumper settings, at least not on the built-in bus.

You would probably be better off leaving the optical drive set to Master and connected to its original built-in bus.

The hard drive would then be set to Master (or to Single if it is a WD brand and Single is available as a setting) and connected to the PCI card's bus. If the Acard card's instuctions say otherwise, follow those.

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Answer 2

Jeff

Level 6

12,058 points

Feb 21, 2010 8:47 AM in response to patrickgates

The Acard AEC-6280M card may not support removable media devices, such as an optical drive. As Don suggested, reconnect the CD-ROM drive to the onboard ATAPI controller. Additionally, a Revision 1 motherboard can support a small IDE hard drive (20 GBs or less) that's connected to the hard drive IDE bus, which is separate from the optical drive bus. You can't connect dual hard drives to this bus, but a single drive can be connected. In any event, you're better off with the Acard Ultra ATA-133 controller card, because it supports large drives (128 GBs ->). Once booted from an installer CD, you'll need to format the hard drive that's connected to the Acard PCI controller card. This ensures that a SCSI driver is written to the hard drive, which is necessary because the computer often recognizes devices connected to these ATA controller cards as SCSI devices.

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Answer 3

patrickgates Author

Level 1

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Feb 21, 2010 12:39 PM in response to patrickgates

Alright, I'm gonna borrow my friends jumpers and I'm gonna go get another IDE cable, Lets hope this works, Thank you so much

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Answer 4

Feb 21, 2010 5:02 PM in response to patrickgates

The drive can probably be recognized and initialized, regardless of its size, on the built-in Hard Drive IDE Bus. However (and here is the tragic flaw) if it is faster than most 20 GB drives, it will be flaky on that Bus. That is why someone put in a SCSI controller, and you are now putting in an IDE controller.

As Jeff and others have suggested, once you get some confidence that things are working a bit, be sure that you:

Connect the drive to the PCI card and initialize it again, regardless of whether you initialized it on the built-in Bus. This will install all the drivers you will need.

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Answer 5

patrickgates Author

Level 1

0 points

Feb 22, 2010 10:28 PM in response to patrickgates

Well.....It didn't work, I set the drive to master, plugged it into the pci card, booted from the install cd and it still says "A valid destination volume can't be found" I have the hd plugged into my macbook right now, so I know it works, but it's just not working inside the computer. I believe that it is a PCI card problem now. so......what do I do next

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Answer 6

Jeff

Level 6

12,058 points

Feb 23, 2010 8:03 AM in response to patrickgates

From my previous post:

" Once booted from an installer CD, you'll need to format the hard drive that's connected to the Acard PCI controller card."

Boot from the installer disk, but don't proceed with the installation. The hard drive needs to be formatted first. Go up to the Installer drop-down menu and select Utilities. Using Disk Utility, you should see the hard drive listed. Select it and then format it as a Mac OS Extended (HFS+) volume (or volumes, if you want to partition it).

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