HDD Beige Power Macintosh G3

EDIT: Chris, due to a long-standing forum software bug, your System Profiler report did not appear this morning until after type my response. So you've basically done what I was asking. I need to research a little and see what options I can find. Your being in AZ makes the search much easier; we in the lower 48 are blessed with many good vendors.

Welcome!

Great to hear that my favorite Mac model has found another fan. I have two that still work--more than I can say for a couple of moribund Intel iMacs, G4s, and MacBook Pros I have lying about.

You are correct. Rev A does not support master/slave cabling on the ATA bus--you get one device on each of the two ATA/IDE buses (Rev B and C supported two per bus). The fact that it has a Zip raises questions. The orig RevAs had the HDD on one ATA/IDE bus and the optical drive on the other--two devices total--you have three. The ZIP makes me think someone has either changed out the ROM chip or is using the onboard SCSI bus for the ZIP or optical drive. Is this a desktop, all-in-one, or minitower?

desktop (DT):

all-in-one (AIO, aka "The Molar"):

mini-tower (MT):

[images from everymac.com]

Not a lot of difference in troubleshooting but choosing replacement drive cables if needed may require different lengths for the MT than the DT and AIO.

I think the best place to start is to get "under the hood" and look at how the existing storage devices are attached to the logic board. Here is a logic board diagram to help you navigate:

Note that the device buses are in the upper right corner of the the diagram.

Once you have traced what device is on what bus, let us know what you found and it will be easier to recommend an effective action. The required PCI cards are getting hard to find as are SCSI hard drives, so I really thing getting a roadmap of your baseline config will be the best place to start.

Although we are early in this process, here are some Beige tips to keep in mind:

• In this model a weak or dead PRAM battery can create a dazzling array of odd problems that may remind you of the movie, "The Exorcist." If anything gets weird, change the PRAM battery first. This is it: NewerTech 3.6v Lithium 1/2 AA PRAM Computer Clock Battery
• If you find you have a Rev B or C board, or upgrade the ROM chip to allow master/slave config, the rule is to put fast storage devices (hard drives) on one ATA/IDE bus and slow devices (optical drives, ZIPs, Jazz drives) on the other. The slowest device on an ATA master/slave bus dictates the bus speed.
• If you have a DT or AIO, they do not offer the cooling efficiency of the spacious minitower case and overheating can be a issue. Clean all the dust bunnies from the insides now and check about every six months. The inside of the fan plenum can look like a compost heap if not maintained. Many Beige DT and AIO owners found that replacing flat ATA cables with the round ones improved airflow for better cooling

I assume that your G3 was manufactured prior to February 1998, since it has the Rev A ROM card. A 20 year-old 6 GB hard drive has less storage capacity than the smallest USB flash drives sold today. Rather than add a second drive, I'd suggest that you replace the original with a new IDE hard drive. Because the onboard IDE controller has a maximum recognition of a 128 GB HDD, a 120 GB drive was the logical, maximum choice for those computers. Temporarily connect the new drive to the optical drive's ribbon cable and boot from the existing hard drive. In the Utilities Folder, run Drive Setup to format and partition the new drive. I found that routine disk maintenance was faster with a smaller partition. It also enables you to install multiple OS versions on the same drive. Drag-copy the contents of the original HDD to the new one, starting with these folders in order: System, Applications, Utilities, Documents, Apple Extras, and CD Extras. Once completed, remove the original HDD and install the new drive in its place. If you want to use a larger-capacity hard drive, there were a couple of pre-OS X compatible, ATA PCI controller cards marketed at the time. You could check ebay for any of those now-discontinued cards: Sonnet Tempo ATA 66, 100, or 133 (3 versions) or the Acard AEC-6280M. Keep in mind that any controller cards marketed for use in PCs won't function in your G3. Have you checked out the "G3 Zone" website?

Good morning Chris,

Sorry I did not get back yesterday--the day took a turn that kept me away. The good news is that with Jeff you have the "A" team for sure.

I found some old-style PCI ATA controller cards on newegg.com but none said they were Mac-compatible.

There is an OSX limitation with the on-board ATA bus and OSX. The Beige G3 with ATA drives on the logic board bus are hardware-constrained requiring that OSX be installed in the first partition on the drive and that partition MUST be under 8GB is size. 8.000G will fail. When I set up Beige G3s for OSX I used Disk Utility to partition, entering the value 7.9999GB for the size of the partition. That way DU did not try to round up to 8GB (= fail). That usually left the working partition at 7.80GB. That means all of OSX has to fit, and a full install was almost 4GB. Most of use learns what to prune to keep room for swap files on the tiny bit of remaining space.

SCSI drives did not suffer this limitation, but the on-board SCSI is slow. However, newegg.com still lists a fair number of SCSI drives, some quite affordable:

scsi hard drives, Desktop Internal Hard Drives, Hard Drives, Components - Newegg.com

My recollection is that the 8GB partition burden DID NOT apply to ATA drives attached to a PCI ATA controller card, making that option more appealing.

The Beige G3 cannot run higher than OS 10.2.8.

A third-party helper app, XPostFacto, allowed us to install OS10.3 which was a MUCH better OS on the Beige than the sketchy 10.2. Technically XPF did not get around the 8GB limit but did allow setting up the first partition as a bootable stepping stone to a larger working partition where another copy of OSX resided. The link to that amazing program the OWC site is now dead, simply looping back to the customer suport page.