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iMac G3 hard drive not being detected

My iMac G3 (Blueberry) has a broken CD drive, and there appeared to be nothing on the hard drive.(question mark finder folder) I plugged in the hard drive in my eMac (USB 2.0 1.25 Ghz.) The drive showed up as Macintosh HD and had some Mac OS 8/9 on it. I deleted the partition to protect anyone's privacy whoever threw this out. I than replaced that installation with mac os 9.1 on it. I put it back in the iMac and it still had question mark folder. is the Hard Disk broken? i dont hear any irregular noises from it. should I replace it with a 60 GB hard disk?

Mac OS 9.1.x

Posted on Mar 10, 2014 7:58 PM

20 replies

Mar 30, 2014 4:42 PM in response to pattifromoak park

50 pin connector is SCSI.

Apr 6, 2014 9:05 AM in response to Eustace Mendis

ok i fixed the problem but it was hard. Since this model was the super cheap one, without firewire, i took the cd rom drive out and than i cut 10 pins off of the 50 pin cd rom connector. I than put in a LG CD-ROM drive and for power put my old desktop to supply power to the CD-ROM drive. I than put in my OS 9 disc and everything works great

Apr 6, 2014 9:46 AM in response to pattifromoak park

That is spectacular! Did you take pictures of the surgery on the scsi connector?

rccharles

Level 6

12,957 points

Apr 6, 2014 10:55 AM in response to pattifromoak park

This is great success.

I second the request for a picture. Any description of what you did would be helpful. Pin outs extra.

My understanding is that the cd rom drive is a laptop cdrom drive.

Robert

Sep 5, 2014 9:38 PM in response to pattifromoak park

Here we go. The CD-ROM drive I connected to it was just a really old IDE Desktop CD-ROM drive. the connector for the hard drive to the mother board is 40 pins. The other connection that is meant for the CD-ROM drive that shares the same wire is 50 pins. I decided to cut off 10 of the pins, and plug a regular IDE CD-ROM drive into my newly modded cable. I had to put the machine upside down while running since the CD-ROM drive was a little large. If you are still interested in pictures after what 4 months I will gladly upload them.

iMac G3 hard drive not being detected