iMac revA into pm7100

Not so deadly .,..

I have a Bondi logic board in a Blueberry body, with 266 processor from a Strawberry (I call my creation Frankenberry). It's got a 6 GB HD and 96 MB RAM.

I put the HD in an externan FW case (Frankenberry's CD drive is dead; this was the only way to load any OS) and loaded Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X (Panther) onto it. Didn't really have any intention of using OS X until I bumped up the RAM to at least 128 MB. But I forgot to set the startup to the OS 9 system folder. Whoops.

In any case, when I put the HD back in Frankenberry, it booted right up. No complaints. No problems. Not even a hiccup. Not exactly the fastest Mac I've got, but it is faster than my Beige G3 tower with a 375 MHz G4.

The lesson: Panther will run on a 266 MHz iMac with just 96 MB RAM. Give it a shot. You might be pleasantly surprised.

I'm with cwsmith on this one. OS X runs reasonably well on the old tray load iMacs. Up until recently, my younger sister was using a bondi iMac (233, 256mb RAM, 8gb hda) that has been with about every family member at one time or another. Right now, it's waiting for redeployment in a closet in my parents' house (upgraded her to a summer 2000 iMac as a christmas present). Where it goes next, who knows. As for it's reliability, it's been in the family since late 1999 with no issues. It has been the most dependable solid mac I've ever encountered. It's a workhorse in the best sense, considering that it's been to more places than I have. In fall of 2003, I put 10.3 on it. It ran ok, but the ancient 4200 rpm 8gb hard drive from 1999 is the machine's weak point.

I'd say 10.2 or 10.3 are worth running on it. 10.4 is probably not the best of ideas (though I have a 333 mhz PowerBook G3 in the extended family running it) As for casing, the 7100 case isn't a bad idea.

Now for your technical questions
the IDE/ATA bus - my understanding is that it's a single bus, so the two devices you've got are it.
mounting the board shouldn't be an issue, but port placement and location for your optical drive will likely prove problematic, as the optical drive's cable isn't terribly long (but still longer than on a slot load). Another issue is the nonstandard cable for the drive - extending this is not going to be easy (look up the iMac put into a Nokia 20 inch monitor in the hacks section for info on this.

I hope this is helpful.

You can use just about anything to make some standoffs for mounting the logic board and the PSU.
Get creative...and a hot glue gun if you're not concerned about aesthetics. Cut up old pens, pieces of Evil Block Company, wooden dowl. Home Depot sells long threaded plastic screws and nuts.
If you need to screw the boards into the standoffs, that's going to limit what you can use (and pilot holes help when creating your own standoffs), otherwise you could place your boards on the standoffs, and use another small squirt of hot glue through the mounting holes to hold the boards in place. Removable with a bit of work.

>(I call my creation Frankenberry).

- flat tire on the way to work, crappy morning, headach like you read bout in a Stephen King novel.

Read this post and almost spit coffee out. Thanks for the laugh!

as for the osx, my brother has a indigo imac dv upgraded from the 400 g3 to a 550 g4. when it was the g3, panther was just no fun and photo shop was the worst thing ever. the g4 upgrade made it run panther and the adode cs just as well as my g3 aio with a 500 g4. thats why i thought the 233 g3 would be a little sluggish. but you guys are doing fine and i will try. not that this machine will run adobe cs nor macromedia mx. this is just to get my wife into either mac or ubuntu. i refuse to pay for windows. i even refuse to run a pirate copy of windows. i already made the mistake of purchasing win2k, but that was only to fix my bro-in-law's dell.

as for the stand-offs, the pen plastic is an awesome idea. i tried just hot glue once a a beige g3 mobo and the resukts were just a little unsatifactory. but the pen bits will...why didnt i think of that...work wonders for what i need.

but i guess i will google just a little more to see what the limits of the ide bus on the imac rev a mobo are.

peace and love
ande

IDE has a limit of 2 devices per chain so if you some how found a pinout for the CD drive bus, then you will get a max of 4 devices.

i have an ide 2.5" to ide 3.5" adaptor. with four vacant pins (1-4) then the adaptor, then two more vacant pins (49-50) you get the proper pin-out. i have a regular ide cd-rom hooked up. but when i loaded ubuntu, it called my hd the 'slave'. here's the thing, the cd has a jumper on 'master' and the hd hAs a jumper on 'cable select'. that is why i asked. it seemed to behave as if they were the same bus. if so, then i can only have one cd one hd. but i am about to turn on my imac right now And then post the answer.

peace and love
ande

i couldnt find data on it or i was looking in the wrong spot. but just in case someone else comes along with the same issue, here's the answer.

there are two seperate ide buses on the rev a imac 233mhz. each does support two seperate devices. a lot of you guys are probably saying duh right now. but i didnt know, i now i do. and mabye this will will help another. becuase applefritter comes up 75% of the time in my google searches.

peace and love
ande

Always happy to help.

That's an interesting phenomenon I've noticed too. It seems many of the topics I'm interested in tend to have come up on AF at some point already, at least in passing. Sometimes I Google for stuff and I end up finding my own posts here on the subject...

Just liberated an iMac 233 and spare motherboard, with an eye to an uber-LC or Classic casemod. Floppy hack, external video hack, IDE hack, serial hack, 333 CPU.