CD-RW/DVD-RW drives in B/W G3

mjbueno75

Registered
I recently acquired an old blue and white G3, 350, 512 RAM, running 10.2.8.

Stripped out the original internal CD-ROM drive and installed a QPS Que!Fire 8x32 CDRW drive that came from a FireWire enclosure.

I then bought a new Lite On SHW-160P6S DVDRW drive and installed it in the old QPS Firewire enclosure. Now I have two problems:

1. I cannot boot from a CD with the QPS CDRW drive - which is now my internal drive.

2. OS X does not recognize my "makeshift" Firewire DVDRW drive. I cannot play DVDs from it, and iTunes does not see it as a recognized drive to burn with.

Any ideas?
 
Well, I'm assuming that the CDRW drive is compatible with Mac OS X... but that doesn't mean that it is a bootable drive. The DVDRW sounds like it is not compatible... at all.

The System Profiler can usually tell you if it is seeing a drive and if it is supported. The manufacturer should know if their drive is bootable for Macs.

And I don't think there was a way to tell by experimentation if that CDRW drive was bootable before because you can't boot a Blue & White via firewire as I recall (or was it that you can't use it in firewire disk mode?).
 
RacerX said:
And I don't think there was a way to tell by experimentation if that CDRW drive was bootable before because you can't boot a Blue & White via firewire as I recall (or was it that you can't use it in firewire disk mode?).
Both, unfortunately... no FireWire booting, no disk mode... ;)

There's really no other way to test bootability with a B&W G3, other than, well, testing the bootability: install a drive, test it, remove it, move on to the next drive.

I can say that I've had excellent results using Pioneer's DVD-RW/CD-RW drives -- all that I've owned (DVR-1xx series) are bootable, and burnable. They're dirt cheap right now, as well:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/optical-drives/superdrives/powermac/
 
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