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JoshKurtz · May 27, 2005, 03:05 PM

Hi,

My teacher gave me his Sonnet Crescendo G4 500MHz upgrade chip that I put in my B&W G3 to no luck. It usually freezes when the white screen with the grey apple is up but sometimes it makes it into Panther. When it freezes, the screen gets darker and tells me that the computer needs to be restarted.
I installed the chip following Sonnet's instructions, installing the software that came with the chip. I even downloaded and installed the newer software and still no luck.
I thought it might be the memory so I put in 4 new 256 sticks and still the same problem.
The G3 processor that came with the B&W works fine.
I'm thinking it might be a hard drive problem. I'd read somewhere that the rev 1 B&W's have 33Mbps bus on their ide channels that can cause problems with the G4 chips.
I tried to boot off the Panther cd and everything is fine until I get to where I choose a disk. If I go into disk utility, it freezes when I try to verify the hard drive. It did this with three different hard drives that all test okay with disk warrior.
My teacher gave me a scsi card for the B&W also so I'm probably going to buy a scsi drive to see if it will do any better (I posted about a drive that a buddy of mine has but it has 80 pins and my card is a 68 pin).
Has anyone experienced anything like this? Any advice?
Thanks

Amacapart · May 27, 2005, 03:59 PM

I had the same machine with a G4 in it.

Only HD that was trouble free was the tiny one it came with.

You can also try plugging a HD into the slower CD ROM bus, as I recall that one didn't have the issue.

discotronic · May 30, 2005, 12:51 AM

Does the processor upgrade require a firmware upgrade to the PowerMac?

JoshKurtz · May 30, 2005, 08:05 AM

Does the processor upgrade require a firmware upgrade to the PowerMac?

I've upgraded the firmware already.

JoshKurtz · May 31, 2005, 09:41 PM

You can also try plugging a HD into the slower CD ROM bus, as I recall that one didn't have the issue.

No luck with that either.
I just need to cough up the money for a scsi drive. If that doesn't do the job then I guess the G4 is bad and I need to buy another.

Waragainstsleep · Jun 1, 2005, 03:37 AM

You can safely install an IDE HD onto the optical bus as a slave. My B&W would never boot from a slave though. That doesn' mean yours won't. SCSI card should also work, though not all are bootable. If its an adaptec you should be OK though.

To reuse other IDE drives you would have to get a PCI ATA controller. Should be a nice speed boost over the on-board too, and no 128GB limit either. You can also add SATA if you want to go really fast.