Installing New IDE Hard Drive.

Question

I can not get my G3 to find and IDE hard drives. I can start up from a 10.2 cd and into os 9.2 but can not fid the added hard drive. Can anyone help

Answer 1

In addition the excellent advice already provided, here are some additional items:
First, to support two devices per ATA channel under OS9, you must have a Beige G3 ROM Rev 2 or 3. In OS9, select Apple System Profiler from the Apple menu. On the first page, look for the section labeled "Production information" and click the disclosure arrow to expand if needed. There will be an entry for "ROM Revision." If this code is not $77D.40F2, OS9 cannot support more than one device on each of your two ATA channels. This limitation is said to go away under OSX.
If you have a Rev 2 or 3, physically attach the extra hard drive to the same ribbon cable that serves the original hard drive. The original drive should be set as "master" via jumper settings (charts available at the drive manufacturer's web site) and the extra drive as "slave." Typically, the master drive is at the end of the ribbon cable and the slave uses the middle connector.
For maximum performance, do not mix fast devices (hard drives) and slow devices (CD-ROMS; internal ZIPs, etc) on the same channel. A slow device sharing a channel with a fast one can slow the fast device.
My Beige G3 has the following arrangement;
ATA0: Master-Maxtor 120GB HD
Slave-Maxtor 80GB HD
ATA1: Master-CD-R optical drive
Slave-internal ZIP 100
Works great with that set-up.