[lothar56]

I've got a beige G3 MT that has been working fine for quite some time. recently, I switched a single IDE cable to a double and installed another hard drive, making it a slave to the CD-ROM. No matter how i configured the two drives, I could only get one or the other to show up. So I switched busses and made it a slave off of the main hard drive. Same thing. Either one drive shows up or the other. But if I unplug one drive, the other always comes up. The only thing I can think of is a faulty cable. Besides that, is there anything else I'm missing?

[wowok1234]

The first revision of the Beige G3 has a limitation in its ROM/firmware that only allowed for one drive on each IDE channel. Later revisions of the Beige G3 had this issue corrected. You most likely had a first rev. Beige G3. In any case, you can upgrade the rom to a rev 2 or rev 3 rom by getting a new rom chip.

http://www.lowendmac.com/ppc/g3.shtml

[lothar56]

Ah, that would explain why my other beige G3 configured exactly the same way doesn't have that problem

I've got connections, so I'll look into a new ROM chip. It's the RAM-looking one next to the RAM right? Thanks for the info.

[lothar56]

Shoot! After I redid my whole hard drive configuration and put the old scsi back, I read further down on that page and found OS X works around the ROM problem and will recognize a slave drive. Sorry, I should have told you I was trying to get it fixed in OS 9 before installing X. Oh well, it all works fine in X now.

[JoshuaZ]

If anyone has this problem, you can always get an ATA PCI card. A beige B3 MT makes for a nice small file server after adding an Ethernet card and ATA card. Ahhh.. college memories. So much duct tape.

[lothar56]

I think os x is a better investment than a pci card to fix the problem, but you're right about the server, you can cram 5 hd's in there.