old iMac G3 Tip

Right i have a tip for anyone with an old iMac G3 and a dead cdrom drive, or someone who wants a new CDR or DVDR drive for an imac g3. the imac has 2 IDE controlers. Well, some have. i have a 333Mhz Model. the 350Mhz and up, slot loading imacs only have one. cant help there. but back to the 233-333 models.

there are 2 controlers. one for the CDROM and one for the Hard Drive. the hard drive controler is a standard one, and can take standard hard drives and cdrom drives. the cdrom drive is one out of a powerbook g3 laptop (Wallstreat G3 i think is its real name).

anyway, i got a standard cdr drive for the mac, a power splitter and a longer ide cable.
1: take the old ide cable from the imac out, put in the newer longer one.
2: take the power going from the board to the hard drive out and put in the splitter.
3: then finally run the cables out though the hole in the front. theres a hole where my dead cdrom drive once was, so thats what i used. not sure what you can use if there is no hole!

4: make sure your ide cdrom drive is set as slave. the imac hard drive is set as master as standard. now when you boot your mac, it should work. it worked for me and on the XLR8yourmac webpage a lot of users have reported sucess.

5: the drive is not bootable as standard. this is due to the mac not booting from slaves. but i have heard if you set the cdrom as master and the hard drive as slave it will work. havent tried this yet, but going to do so tonight.

There are some pics of the work i did on the mac
Hope this is a handy tip for you all. i just got in to macs a few weeks ago so im learning. good luck!
there are a few photos here which where taken with a camera phone, so there not the best quality, but you can see stuff. as for the taking the hard drive out, i used this place. handy tips there.