Mac OS 9 Discussion > Storage

Just cannot get the optical drive to work on my G4 Mac Mini 1.5Ghz.

(1/4) > >>

fergycool:
I've got a G4 Mac Mini 1.5Ghz. I have never been able to boot from the CD or indeed access a disk in it. - The only way I can eject a disk is to boot to Open Firmware and eject it there.
System Profiler always shows the disk but always without any media loaded.

At first I assumed it was because the only disks I had were 700Mb. But after sourcing some 650Mb ones they did not work either. I always get the error that the disk is not initialised.

I gave up with the optical drive at that point and eventually I got Mac OS9 installed by imaging (using iBored) the v9 install image to the internal original disk (attached) when booted from an external USB drive running OS X. Then booting from that and installing to a new IDE adaptor/mSATA disk that was temporarily connected using an USB<>IDE adaptor. Once the mSATA was installed as the internal drive this boots fine.

However, I still wanted to get the optical drive working so I replaced the original optical drive with a Panasonic UJ-875. Unfortunately as luck would have it this does not work either!

I got into thinking that it's a Master/Slave/CL thing, so messed with a tiny jumper on the IDE adaptor. But after booting in all combinations I realise that it's likely not that as the original disk had the same problem.

So before I give up ever wanting to use an optical drive in this Mac Mini is there something simple I may have done? Perhaps I've damaged the riser board that the internal and optical drive attach to?

Thanks!

ssp3:
Wasn't there something about internal drives requiring Apple firmware?
Back in the day we had to hack Apple's CD or CD/DVD driver to make non-Apple drives work and I also had to modify one kext in OSX in my Intel Mini to be able to use non-Apple external DVD drives.

Try booting off of CD by holding down cmd-opt-shift-delete

fergycool:
Thanks. That boot combination does nothing I'm afraid. For optical drives though I thought it was the old world (motorola) Macs that needed Apple firmware drives (although this is a very faint and distant memory!).

ssp3:
It's just a thought, but maybe try ROM file from v8 installer? I think ELN did more changes to v9 ROM compared to v8. There was something about ATA drivers too. Maybe they interfere?

http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=2408.msg37482#msg37482

fergycool:
Thanks. I tried that but no change.

I also reverted to the original optical drive. This does not read any CDrs, but it does actually read a non-cdr CD. This disk is not read by the replacement drive so I think you are correct and these need to be Apple firmware drives.

So I either give up and be satisfied by the non-optical drive containing Mac Mini or go hunt for how to flash these drives! :-)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page