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2pound · Nov 14, 2005, 12:35 PM

Hello,

I had a Seagate 120GB hard drive that I wanted to install into my Blue and White G3 Powermac. Unfortunately I found out that they could only except hard drives up to 80GB unless it had an IDE Controller in a PCI slot. I purchased one of those as well as a 1GHz G3 Zif processor. I also noticed that the IDE controller required an operating system from at least OS 8.5 to work but, I had a clean hard drive so I put the hard drive in a friend of mine's G4 and instaled Panther on it. From their I put in the processor and IDE Controller along with the hard drive that now has OS 10.3 on it into my G3. The hard drive is spinning but, my mac still isn't working. Do you know what I may have did wrong? I also have about 320 MB of RAM and was installing another 256MB during this process too but, haven't had the mac to come up to see if it took.

2pound

tooki · Nov 14, 2005, 01:07 PM

There's no 80GB limit; the 120GB drive should have worked fine, as long as it's a Rev B unit. (Rev A units have a defective IDE controller that basically doesn't work with any modern drives.)

As for why the drive's not working on the IDE card: you need to reformat the drive while connected to the IDE card. (A disk formatted while connected to on-board IDE may not have the proper drivers on it.)

tooki

2pound · Nov 14, 2005, 03:10 PM

now when I try and boot up even with the old 6G that came with the system, I get nothing. my lights on the motherboard light up but nothing appears on my monitor. I have upgraded the processor and now nothing works with or without the pci adaptor

tooki · Nov 14, 2005, 03:35 PM

Use a voltmeter to check the voltage of the PRAM battery. If it's dead, the system won't boot.

tooki

2pound · Nov 14, 2005, 03:45 PM

Thanks,

I'll give that a try tonight and post my results.

-2pound

2pound · Nov 15, 2005, 09:25 AM

My Battery is at 3.58 volts it's GOOD. I'm still working on my problem. If anyone has seen this situation before or have any futher instructions it will be greatly appreciated.

-2pound

seanc · Nov 15, 2005, 09:42 AM

Try the old processor.

2pound · Nov 16, 2005, 10:40 AM

I've tried that and same result with both processors although since I had put in the new processor my heat sink seems to be kind a loose it doesn't feel like it's on too firm on. Is that a problem?

seanc · Nov 16, 2005, 10:45 AM

Yes. The heatsink needs to be on quite firmly to make contact with the CPU.
Did you do the firmware updates before you installed the new CPU?

2pound · Nov 16, 2005, 12:10 PM

I have the heat sink secured firmly now and the it's a clean hard drive out the box and it is the only hard drive that I'm using in the mac. I thought because of that I wouldn't need any firmware updates. I'm still in same situation.

2pound

iDaver · Nov 17, 2005, 12:00 AM

Will it boot from an OS 9 CD? I may be wrong but I thought the B&Ws needed a firmware update to run any version of X.

tooki · Nov 17, 2005, 11:29 AM

Nah. (Though the last firmware update deliberately blocked G4 processors.) It's still good to make sure the firmware is current.

tooki

2pound · Nov 18, 2005, 09:53 AM

As of right now I don't know any way to put a firmware update on my mac (if needed) because it will not come on. The green light comes on and the hard drive is obviously spinning but, nothing shows up on the monitor no mac face or question mark or anything.