Quicksilver 2002 Power Mac G4 Rebuild

[Ninester]

Hello, first post, hi ya'll is?

Ok, back in the mac after my bitter departure from all things apple after troubleshooting my then new B&W REV 1 for HD corruption then finding out the Rev 2 boards were out. I was not a happy camper and apple did not give a shit either after several heated phone calls....and the one time I did not buy from Apple "mom and pop" store 60 miles away.

So, I could not resist the cheap G4 in the subject.  I will be replacing high time fans, drives and OS down the road.  The cpu and P.S. fans are seized up with the seller running it like he did not know a thing about the fans. An air compressor to blow out dust wads and some teflon oil got the fans running to check other things out.  During check out, fan on the Radeon GPU started making a racket.  LOL, starting to feel like a vet with a run over dog.

What I would like to do:

Get fan for PS and rebuild down the road.

Find second IDE drive or SATA adapter that allow booting if prices are reasonable.

Find Tiger DVD for this machine.  Found 9.2.2 on this site.  Thanks to all who had anything to add to 9.2.2 project!

As is, the mac is taking about 2-3 minutes to boot.  After 20 years, cannot remember how long G3 took, however my Mac SE blows the doors off the G4 in booting off old SCSI Zip Drive
I cannot say of the integrity of 10.3 or 80 meg drive in the G4 so fun down the road.  I do not want to clean drive until all new start up disks verified.

Any help with the Tiger DVD and where to best look for drives would be astounding!

Thanks for reading!

[FdB]

Greetings… and welcome.

One QS here had non-working PS fan. Replaced it and found no-go state
was the result of PS fan circuitry itself. Applied 12 volts direct from old DC
power puck (you may have one of those around somewhere), to the original
(out-of-PS), non-working fan and it worked. Quick check may save some money.
(Yet possibly lead to PS questions?)

SATA bridge adapter (ADP-06), from B&H Photo - New York… $9.95 each.
www.bhphotovideo.com

Tiger DVD (or non-DVD version), install disks available for download from
Macintosh Garden - http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/mac-osx-mac-os-10-ppc
Scroll down (big list), and find exactly what you want.

Your mileage may indeed vary.

[Ninester]

Wow, thanks Fury deBongo Sir!

Found all items you posted.  Question on the SATA bridge adapter (ADP-06).  Will this allow booting?  I plan on two partitions, one 9 and the other Tiger instead of the all in one mess I currently have.  I will order card tonight if bootable.

ThX!

[FdB]

Depending upon your Quicksilver you may be limited in actual “accessible” HD size.
Just put a WD Scorpio Blue 250 GB SATA drive in (using an ADP-06 bridge) and it
booted OS 9. This QS (even though it says 2002), recognizes 137 MB of the drive
and then notes 128 MB as “available” (on this 250 MB drive).

See, for more info:
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g4/specs/powermac_g4_800_qs.html

In answer to your question… Yes, bootable.

[DieHard]

From the OS 9 Lives Main site:

Power Mac G4 QuickSilver 733, 800, Dual 800, 867, 933, and Dual 1 GHz with logic board 820-1342-B (QS logic board 820-1276-A will NOT work and peak out at 128 GB), and all Power Mac G4 MDD models are a go (except for the FW800 models since they will NOT boot to OS 9 directly).  <- Well. I better fix that one day

logic board 820-1342-B -> Drives Above 128GB
logic board 820-1276-A -> Peaks out at 128GB

Open Cover and Look

[Ninester]

I've got the dual 1 GHz - 1342-B main board.  Ordering card tonight Fury deBongo.

I was getting disappointed in all the discontinued drive cards so bootable is good news.  How do you guys find the sata vs IDE drive speeds considering the bridge card?

The QS will also be a bridge mac between SE and macbook '07.  With all the knowledge on this board I may beg a question or two in the future.

If I can't find a P.S. fan replacement, then the adapter whips may be a good option, but read I may have to give up Apple flat screen and sleep options with a pc supply. My fan works, bearings dried out but slowing down again after 4 days.

Any suggestions welcome.  Thanks again for the help!

[reader50]

How do you guys find the sata vs IDE drive speeds considering the bridge card?

Your QS has ATA-66 for the HD buss (-33 for the optical buss), while the SATA-IDE bridge will be rated at ATA-133. So the bridge board will be transparent. Your ATA-66 interface will be the bottleneck.

ATA (parallel or serial) loses 25% of bandwidth to overhead (commands, error checking, etc). So while ATA-66 claims 66MB/s, actual throughput is 3/4 of that: 50 MB/s. The typical new HDD today can do 150-250 MB/s at the beginning of the drive, falling in half by the end of the drive. So a new SATA HD will saturate your ATA-66 buss across the entire HD.

SATA-1 is rated at 1.5 Gbps, which in PATA terms would be ATA-187, or about 140 MB/s actual. So using a SATA card is about 3x as fast as running off the PATA buss, provided your HD is fast enough to saturate the SATA-1 connection. Most modern SATA HDDs can max out SATA-1, at least at the beginning of the drive. The very biggest HDDs (like 12 TB) might be able to saturate SATA-1 all the way to the end of the drive.

btw, there is almost no point to using a SATA-2 card in a PowerMac G4. The PCI buss is rated at 266 MB/s, while SATA-2 can do about 280 MB/s per port. Even a SATA-1 card, doing a drive-drive copy will saturate the PCI buss. The best it could manage is 133 MB/s, less than full SATA-1 speed. And that's assuming nothing else is using bandwidth on the PCI buss.

Bottom line, a SATA card is faster with a modern HD. If you're recycling an older (smaller) HD, then a SATA card will be somewhat faster at the beginning of the drive. Likely to be the same speed once you get further into the drive. In my own G4, I'm using older SATA drives, so I'm not testing my SATA card fully. And it's been long enough since I used the G4 daily, that I don't recall how it compares.

Apologies if this is more info than you wanted to hear. I can get on a roll sometimes.

[Ninester]

Thank You! Well said with better than expected performance using the bridge card.  My QS and its 80GB WD drive is  well used from a local university. I ordered the kingswell card earlier tonight. I'll be happy to get the WD drive replaced for clean OS installs.

Thanks for your time!

Mick

[DieHard]

Mactron and others have done extensive testing, even with 64-Bit SATA cards in a G4

http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php/topic,803.0.html

You can see some "real world" speed tests

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

also, you may want to consider a SATA bridge an an SSD connected to the PATA

http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php/topic,3576.0.html

This will leave the bandwidth of the PCI for other things (like Audio PCI Cards), and still blow away the old mechanical IDE drives

[Ninester]

Thanks Diehard,

Good reads, I did order the Kingwin ADP-06. Looks like all the darn Mac users bought up all the pci sata boards, no?  At least anything affordable.

Mick

[FdB]

Ninester,

Congrats on your PSU fan replacement. I used an MDD's PSU fan
for a replacement CPU fan in my QS -- constant high speed...
until I get around to "correct" replacement. ("Wind Tunnel Jr.")

Any more of those "well-used" University Quicksilvers in your locale
(just in case brief road trips might be undertaken)?

[DieHard]

My favorite Quicksilver PS fan replacement is an IXTREMA 80 Pro series, sku# IXP-54-14T by Silenx

It rates as super quiet (max 14db) and Pretty good CFM at 32cfm
Best airflow to noise ratio

[reader50]

Do you have a fav replacement for a Sawtooth PS fan? It's the last noise source on mine, not terribly bad. I'm reluctant to take it apart, then leave it apart for three weeks while a fan arrives from China. So much better to order the part first.

[Ninester]

Fury deBongo, check the New Orleans Craigslist for "old Macs".  One of the Proffs at Xavier is dumping several Macs.  Cleaner than dumpster diving?  Sorry, you just missed Mardi Gras!  You may have a fan board problem for the speed issue?

DieHard, thanks, also found the original for $16! from china, fwiw, but would have to dig up link if anyone interested, reader50?

Reformatted original drive, two partitions, then apply all the Tiger and 9 lives! downloads, Thanks All!

One issue with OS9 with both new and the old installs. Halfway into boot I get the mac with question mark for about 10 seconds then happy mac, then boot completes. Normal or do I need to adjust something?

Adapter should be here, Monday

[reader50]

One issue with OS9 with both new and the old installs. Halfway into boot I get the mac with question mark for about 10 seconds then happy mac, then boot completes. Normal or do I need to adjust something?

Re-select the startup volume in Startup Disk. From what you describe, your Mac isn't finding a startup disk where it expects, then finds one after checking the available drives.

[FdB]

Ninester (Ninth Ward?). Where yat dahlin?

Might have just made it down, if I’d only known there were Quicksilvers
to be had. No fan board prob here. (Wrong type fan.) Sounds like you’ve
definitely got it on the run now.

Indeed... laissez les bons temps rouler!

[Ninester]

I'm on third install of OS9 lives.  The bootable cd works great. After restart, SLOW boots and will not remember start up volumes no mater how many times I choose my separate os 9 volume.  I turned of some recommended extensions then get rebooted into black screen. Holding shift still gets black screen, using all ATI extensions for Rage 6 radeon card.  Something all squirreled up?

thx

[reader50]

Does it forget the date also? A dead PRAM battery will cause that. 3.6v lithium, 1/2 AA size.

If the battery is good, try resetting the PRAM. Control-Option-P-R during startup until you hear it bong an extra time or two.

[FdB]

Is that Radeon still making a "racket" or did you change it?

Sounds as if maybe you've turned something off that you need.
Turn all extensions back on and then methodically turn off and test
as you go. Seemed like you had it so-nearly ironed out earlier.

[Ninester]

reader50  The battery new, reset pram 3 bongs, still get ? then system found. I get into the start screen, beach balls, wait for it..black screen or cursor shows classic bomb, random.  This is third install. Tiger runs fine on it's seperate partition but takes 1:30 to boot.

At second install I ran Disk Aid, drive healthy. Reformat "extended" before each install using Boot CD that always
works. BTW, except for one time, OS9 acted same way when machine dragged home. That school install went south by the time I had Tiger boot cd burned and verified. I'm a bit blind sided ATM.

Lol, starting to creep me out,,Voodoo Mac? ..or old drive with hexadecimal on it.

Fury deBongo  I pulled fan, flushed with freon, added a drop of light oil. Out of spite it made less racket but still not happy. I have some cpu fans that I can glue, weld, bolt to keep card alive. Prof at Xavier said they had a pile of dead cards that had dead fans