Just a quick question about replacing a hard drive in a 17" 800MHz G4 iMac. Do I need to stick with an ATA/66 hard drive or is an ATA/100 hard drive okay to use? I keep getting conflicting information about this, and I want to find out for certain before I buy a new hard drive.
I just upgraded my 17" 800MHz iMac, I used a Western Digital Caviar 300GB/7200 RPM/8MB/ATA-100. This drive is working fine in my system at this time. I also upgraded to a Plextor PX-716A DVD burner also working fine (so far). I had to boot from an external firewire DVD drive to install OS X but otherwise no problems.
Did you replace it yourself? If so, did you follow instructions from somewhere, and how easy was it. I'm looking into replacing my failing HD and was curious what the possible consequences would be.
I did all the work myself. I found the instructions for the upgrade at "www.xlr8yourmac.com". There I found an article titled "iMac G4 - Exchanging Optical Drive, Hard Disk, RAM by Stefan Horn". The instructions are straightforward and fairly easy to follow. I would caution you to be careful of the copper tape that Apple used on the disk drives, it is sharp and you could cut yourself so be careful when removing it. I opted not to attempt to reinstall the copper tape and have not had any problems as a result. I used a Plextor 716 DVD and have later learned that iTunes does not support this drive (haven't tried iMovie yet). However Toast works fine with the Plextor 716, not sure why Apple has chosen not to support Plextor.
did you try to install patchburn 3 (also found on the xlr8yourmac site)? it is supposed to resolve the issues with iLife products. Also, Tiger and iLife '06 is reported to have native support with a broader range of third party hardware.
