>128GiB drive in old iMac?

[Tim Hill]

First, thank you, Chad, for setting up, running, and now reviving this
list!

Now the question I wanted to post a couple days ago (hope someone in
addition to Chad will get it):

I have to replace the hard drive in my aunt's 350 MHz indigo iMac G3
(Summer 2000). I understand there are only enough address bits in this
iMac's PATA interface for 128GiB, but it's now difficult and
relatively expensive to buy a <250GB drive. So I ordered a 250GB
Hitachi drive. Is it gonna work?

Thanks!

- Tim

--
Timothy N. Hill
416 Linden Street, Wellesley Hills, MA 02481-4909, USA
home: +1 781-235-2902 <thi...@wesleyan.edu> AIM: tnh666
mobile: +1 781-929-7673 text message: <t...@tmomail.net>

[jystickman]

Agreed! Thanks Chad for putting this back together!

Tim, I recently ran into the same dilemma with an even older 233MHz
Beige G3 Mac. How to replace the old 4GB IDE drive. In the end, I
just found a very cheap $6 replacement drive on eBay. As that Mac has
a very specific purpose (to play SimCity 2000), the (lack of) capacity
didn't really bug me. :-)

Sorry - may not be the answer you were looking for.

--James

On Oct 21, 10:09 am, Tim Hill <thil...@wesleyan.edu> wrote:
> First, thank you, Chad, for setting up, running, and now reviving this
> list!
>
> Now the question I wanted to post a couple days ago (hope someone in
> addition to Chad will get it):
>
> I have to replace the hard drive in my aunt's 350 MHz indigo iMac G3
> (Summer 2000). I understand there are only enough address bits in this
> iMac's PATA interface for 128GiB, but it's now difficult and
> relatively expensive to buy a <250GB drive. So I ordered a 250GB
> Hitachi drive. Is it gonna work?
>
> Thanks!
>
>   - Tim
>
> --
> Timothy N. Hill
> 416 Linden Street, Wellesley Hills, MA 02481-4909, USA

> home:   +1 781-235-2902   <thil...@wesleyan.edu>   AIM: tnh666

[David Knapke]

I don't know that gory details of that Mac per se, but almost all Macs
will boot off an external drive. Buy a USB or firewire drive and use
it.

djk

[James Hsieh]

233MHz Beige G3 is the last Mac without USB. External drives are good
ol' fashioned SCSI. :-)

--James

[Timothy N. Hill]

On 2009 Oct 21, at 10:09, Tim Hill wrote:

> ... Now the question I wanted to post a couple days ago (hope

> someone in addition to Chad will get it):
>
> I have to replace the hard drive in my aunt's 350 MHz indigo iMac G3
> (Summer 2000). I understand there are only enough address bits in
> this iMac's PATA interface for 128GiB, but it's now difficult and
> relatively expensive to buy a <250GB drive. So I ordered a 250GB
> Hitachi drive. Is it gonna work?

Well, after some guesswork and experimentation, I can answer my own
question. Just in case anybody's interested:

Yes, it works. Disk Utility running on the iMac recognizes that the
disk's usable capacity is only 128GiB and formats it accordingly.

That was the easy part. Tiger (10.4) is the latest OS that works on
this iMac (<http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1514> notwithstanding), but
Tiger came on a DVD, which this iMac can't read, and I couldn't use
target disk mode, because this iMac doesn't have a FireWire port. So
after formatting the drive on the iMac, I moved it to an external
case, connected it to a newer Mac, loaded Tiger, and then put the disk
back in the iMac.