Mac OS 9 Lives

Mac OS 9 Discussion => Hardware => Topic started by: macStuff on November 30, 2018, 12:44:13 AM

Title: scsi cdrom upgrade on old macs to a scsi cdr/w? will it work?
Post by: macStuff on November 30, 2018, 12:44:13 AM
hey just a quick question
i have an old mac that has a scsi cdROM but the cdROM is incredibly slow.. its like a 2x cdROM
if its a scsi cdROM, can i just replace it + swap it out with a 8x or higher cdrom? and have it work? ie: getting all the speed benefits of the faster drive including readin/writing (Burning) even if the original drive was not a R/W drive?

i would think if it works for my machine it would work for any and all old macs that have scsi optical drives...
but the machine im speaking of directly is a performa 5200CD (Road apple!) this would be one of the reasons why it was branded a roadapple lol
cdrom is so slow
Title: Re: scsi cdrom upgrade on old macs to a scsi cdr/w? will it work?
Post by: refinery on December 04, 2018, 06:53:33 PM
it should work fine as a cd-rom but you might need to install third party drivers like toast or FWB or others to get CD-R/W functions to work, if at all.
Title: Re: scsi cdrom upgrade on old macs to a scsi cdr/w? will it work?
Post by: darthnVader on December 05, 2018, 07:25:56 PM
Should work just fine, tho you'll need Toast to burn with. I never needed the FBW CD toolkit for any of my internal SCSI CD burners.

Tho I had an old Powerbook 5300c with an external portable CDROM drive, that I needed the toolkit driver, unless I booted the system with a bootable Mac OS Install CD in the drive, then I could swap the CD with any other CD, and it would mount.

Little known fact, a bootable HFS CD has the Apple CD/DVD ROM driver in the partition table. Old World Mac's will boot from a unsupported HFS drive if you hold the right key combination at boot, or you have no other bootable disks.

As far as OS 9's builtin disk burning software, I don't think it can be hacked to work with SCSI drives. I was never able to hack OS X to burn disks from a SCSI drive, tho they will work for unsupported ATA drives with a small hack.

Likely, now that I know how to hack OS 9 Extensions, we could get Disc Burning to work in OS 9 on unsupported ATA drives, but that really doesn't help with SCSI, I just thought I'd put it out there for OS 9 users that want Apple Disc Burn software to work with replacement drives.
Title: Re: scsi cdrom upgrade on old macs to a scsi cdr/w? will it work?
Post by: macStuff on December 05, 2018, 08:56:08 PM
well the whole reason i got this mac was to eventually put a quadra 630 mobo inside of it.. and have scsi cd + color graphics CRT