Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

j mars · Jun 5, 2003, 10:06 AM

For some reason my beige G3 (533 G4/768 MB ram) does not find the second IDE bus(#1). My CDRom and second hard disk (OS9 disk) have disappeared. The OSX (10.2.6) disk alone on the first bus (#0) is the only one showing on the desktop and under System Profiler. Does anyone know how to correct this within terminal? With no CD I can't even reinstall Jaguar which is my last resort. I have fscked and permissioned many times but end up loosing the bus. Any ideas?

dragonfly006 · Jun 5, 2003, 01:46 PM

We had a similar issue with one of our beige G3 mini-towers. For no good reason the zip and CD ROM (on the secondary IDE bus) just stopped working. I thought that the drives had gone bad, but at the same time? So I decided to do some testing. I was convinced that it was a hardward/motherboard issue. I discovered that (for whatever reason) switching the devices on bus 1 to bus 2 (and bus 2 to bus 1) actually fixed the problem. I didn't do alot of follow up testing with it to see if there were any performance differences, but it was fully functional. Hope this helps.

Millennium · Jun 6, 2003, 08:13 AM

I have had this happen a few times on my Beige G3 (and a few times on my Ti/400 as well). In all cases, they have been temporary.

I have never quite figured out why the Beige would do it, or how exactly it was fixed. On the Ti/400, though, I figured it out; if you shut down the machine (sleep and restart don't work; you have to completely power down) and wait for a minute or so, then power it back up again, everything is fine.

Perhaps unplugging the Beige for a few minutes, accompanied by a CUDA reset (that little black button on the motherboard, next to the PCI slots; hold it down for twenty seconds), will do the job. It's as close as I can think of to a possible fix, even though I know it's rather voodoo-ish.

j mars · Jun 6, 2003, 08:20 AM

The switching of the IDE plugs on the motherboard has done the trick. The plug designations have somehow been swapped, other than that everything is normal.The only explaination I can think if is that the plugs are named 0 and 1. In digital terms this means power off, power on. Perhaps we have some electrons playing around in the motherboard?