[qhtrinh]

Hey there,

My brother gave me his old Powermac G3 (well it's a teal-white tower), but the hard drive is dead. I replaced it with a maxtor drive I found. Well, I think I have to do some formatting, but I have a few questions

1) First off, can we use any hard drive with macs?

2) I don't have any CDs or boot CDs, what do I need? I don't have any manuals or anything also... from what I saw on the Internet, people say to drop in the Mac CDs and it has a format utility. Where do I find this?

Right now, it's only flashing that folder with the face on it, just like when I dropped my 2nd Gen iPod

[galarneau]

The tricky thing with the B&W G3's is that there are two revision motherboards. The first one is ****, and won't work with most modern hard drives of any reasonable size.

The second revision will work just fine with any hard drive, though you'll only be able to use 128GB of it if it's larger than 128GB unless you buy a IDE controller card.

As for software, you'll be able to use OS X or OS 9 but just make sure you have enough RAM for OS X.

If you want to figure out which rev. motherboard you have, look here:

xlr8yourmac.com - Photos of new B&W G3 Rage128 and dual Drive IDE bracket and Cable

[qhtrinh]

Thank you! I'll check it out

[discotronic]

Originally Posted by galarneau 

The tricky thing with the B&W G3's is that there are two revision motherboards. The first one is ****, and won't work with most modern hard drives of any reasonable size.

The second revision will work just fine with any hard drive, though you'll only be able to use 128GB of it if it's larger than 128GB unless you buy a IDE controller card.

As for software, you'll be able to use OS X or OS 9 but just make sure you have enough RAM for OS X.

If you want to figure out which rev. motherboard you have, look here:

xlr8yourmac.com - Photos of new B&W G3 Rage128 and dual Drive IDE bracket and Cable

The first B&W G3's did have a problem with data corruption but they will work with larger hard drives. Just be prepared to lose data.

My brother's B&W has been running great for 3 years with a 40GB drive without data corruption. It is a first run 300MHz board so the controller is defective. However, this has not been a problem yet.

[bowwowman]

Originally Posted by qhtrinh 

Hey there,

My brother gave me his old Powermac G3 (well it's a teal-white tower), but the hard drive is dead. I replaced it with a maxtor drive I found. Well, I think I have to do some formatting, but I have a few questions

1) First off, can we use any hard drive with macs?

2) I don't have any CDs or boot CDs, what do I need? I don't have any manuals or anything also... from what I saw on the Internet, people say to drop in the Mac CDs and it has a format utility. Where do I find this?

Right now, it's only flashing that folder with the face on it,

1) Yes you can use any standard ATA 66/100/133 hdd with the B&W's, but only 128GB or less when connected to the mobo. Any size you want when coupled w/ a pci controller card (way faster this way, also you can use SATA too!)

2) you need to buy a retail copy of either OS 9.2.2 or 10.4.xx. For OS 9, you will need at least 128mb of ram, more is better. For OS X, 512 is the minimum, 1GB is the max for this machine and is way better than 512.

FLashy folder = no vaild system folder. Insert OS CD, start up holding down the "c" key. When it boots, the installer screen comes up, but quit the installer & open the Disk Utility from the toolbar menu.
Select your new HD, clik erase/reformat and let it do it's thing. Once that is done, install the OS and reboot

and finally, most of all........

be happy

post back if you need more help, we're here for ya !