I wouldnt exactly call this a hardware hack as i would call it a redneck fix. but i just aquired an flower slot load imac with no cd or hard disk. im just woundering if its possible to make a cable to connect ide drives to this system (the computer was missing the origianal hard disk cable) i know the connecter is a standard 50 pin and ide is 40pin, im woundering if it would be possible to take a scsi 50pin cable and attach a 40pin connector to it. (pinouts anyone)
otherwise anyone have the cable and a slot load cddrive for sale?
jasperj@charter.net
Flower Power has two FireWire ports. How about just hooking up a FireWire hard drive and optical drive, especially if you have any lying around? This will also help you get around the internal 128GB drive size limit on the G3 iMacs.
unfortunately firewire is the one thing i have never had, everything i have is usb, (tried booting OS9.1 from a flash drive but it didnt work) but i do have an older imac rev7 with working drives, just no cable that would connect
Photos (not immensely helpful text, unfortunately.
Another set
Basically, 40 pins of the 50 pin connector are a plain IDE pinout, while the rest carry power and audio signals to/from the proprietary CD-ROM drive. If you don't care about screwing up the motherboard pins you can just cram a normal IDE cable into the correct end of the connector and hang drives off it as usual. To quote the second article: "In the iMac mobo I put the 40 pin IDE cable into the 50 pin connector using the pins closest to the PRAM battery."
If you *don't* want to do that, then this article notes that you can make a working cable by splitting a 50 pin SCSI cable between pins 10 and 11 and pressing on a 40 pin connector.
The one advantage I could see, and this is *purely* theoretical, to just squishing a normal cable into the motherboard slot is you could use an 80 wire UDMA-rated IDE cable and possibly get better speed/reliability then you would with a recycled SCSI cable. Admittedly I don't know first-hand whether the original cable was UDMA-rated or not, as I've never been inside a slot-loader.
--Peace
well i normally wouldnt have the balls just to shove a ide cable onto the board unless someone else suggested it, but after looking how he made his cable i did just that connected a standard ide cable from pins 11-50 and hooked up a cdrom/hard drive with a power spliter and am installing osx 10.2 right now.
thanks a bunch, now i just need to think of what i want to do with my older RevC iMac with no hard drive.