powermac g3 - mobo damaged?

8 posts / 0 new
Last post
chris501's picture
Offline
Last seen: 14 years 9 months ago
Joined: Apr 5 2005 - 04:35
Posts: 232
powermac g3 - mobo damaged?

hi there!

well, first i was so pleased that a friend of mine has given me his old b/w g3. but then i discovered that it likes to eat hard drives. the original hd was dead, just clicking and whining... then i replaced it with a good known hard drive from a g4. worked well a few days, then - bam! - same error again. hmmm...

now i'm a little bit afraid that when i put in another hard drive, it will eat that one too. so i started to boot it up from cd, didn't work, the g3 got stuck with the happy mac face. tried another os 8.6 cd, had the same experience. could it be that the mobo is a little bit crappy?

Offline
Last seen: 16 years 11 months ago
Joined: Jun 30 2005 - 19:08
Posts: 88
Is is a rev A? If it is, put

Is is a rev A? If it is, put a Rev B mobo in it. The Rev A had a bad ATA controller chip. The Rev B fixed that.

Dr. Webster's picture
Online
Last seen: 1 hour 26 min ago
Joined: Dec 19 2003 - 17:34
Posts: 1760
Re: Is is a rev A? If it is, put

The Rev A had a bad ATA controller chip. The Rev B fixed that.

To clarify, the Rev A had an IDE controller chip that had troubles with secondary hard drives. And it didn't kill drives either, just eat data.

The Rev B boards had a better controller that played nice with both primary and secondary drives.

Your motherboard is likely bad, though, if it kills drives.

Hawaii Cruiser's picture
Offline
Last seen: 7 years 9 months ago
Joined: Jan 20 2005 - 16:03
Posts: 1433
firewire module

So what happens with the bad harddrives besides the whining sounds? Do they boot at all? Do you get video output and what Mac OS do they have? Have you tried the bad harddrives in another machine?
A bad firewire module can stop your boots at the happy face, so try removing the firewire module from the motherboard and then boot from the CD.

catmistake's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 1 month ago
Joined: Dec 20 2003 - 10:38
Posts: 1100
to tell

the Rev B boards have a chip labeled "402" near the PCI bus, the Rev A doesn't have it anywhere (the only way I know to tell...)

yeah, and I'm not sure it being Rev A would make any difference...

What causes HD to be killed? Power spikes? Could that be a bad power supply?

I've had scsi cards that fried HDs before, so maybe a bad controller can be wonky.

Offline
Last seen: 19 years 2 months ago
Joined: Apr 6 2004 - 23:49
Posts: 1
Specifically the Rev B mother

Specifically the Rev B motherboard has a CMD-402 IDE controller and the Rev A motherboard have a lower numbered CMD IDE controller like a CMD-401 or CMD-400. The IDE controller on the Rev A boards have a tendency to eat data because of hardware bugs on the controller. At any rate, another way to tell at if you probably have a rev A board is if there are screw holes and a second connectors on the IDE and power cables for a second hard drive on the drive sled nearest the back. There is another drive sled nearer to the front that only has space for one drive on both revisions I would say that it would probably be a Rev A board because some Rev B boards shipped with only single hard drive drive sleds too. However no Rev A boards shipped with the dual drive sled.

chris501's picture
Offline
Last seen: 14 years 9 months ago
Joined: Apr 5 2005 - 04:35
Posts: 232
it's a rev. a motherboard

it's a rev. a motherboard, the mobo is from 1998...

didn't have time to test the suggestions with the firewire ports though, but i will test it later that day.

thanks!

chris501's picture
Offline
Last seen: 14 years 9 months ago
Joined: Apr 5 2005 - 04:35
Posts: 232
yes. yeah... yuhuuu!!!!

this is requesting an extra "arrrrrrr", although pirate's day is already passed by this year.

you were completely right with the firewire board. it's gone. forever... after removing it, the mac was booting successfully from the original os 8.6 cd without problems! however, the original hard drive is damaged, this is for sure. it spins up, then it clicks a couple of times, spins down, then spinning up again and the whole story starts from the beginning.

thanks a lot for your help and sharing your experience! h.a.n.d., chris

ps: next step -> testing another hard drive and hope that the b/w g3 doesn't eat it too...

Log in or register to post comments