I recently purchased a G3 B&W (Rev. 1) 400 from eBay. I have plenty I could say about the seller and eBay, but that would be a bit off-topic.
When I got it, of course I had to mess around with Hardware before I even plugged it in. I took a bunch of hardware out of my beige G3 (which just up and quit on me a few weeks ago), and started throwing it in the B&W. After I was done I had 4 Hard Drives (The stock SCSI 9 GB Quantum that sounds like a helicopter taking off, a 9 GB SCSI Seagate Cheetah, a 20GB WD Caviar IDE, and a 30GB Seagate IDE. I'm sort of a packrat.) The 30 GB (My system-drive-to-be) was plugged into the secondary IDE bus, mainly because I've heard rather vague warnings about a slaved system drive in Rev. 1 B&W's. The 20 GB drive was set to master, with the CD-ROM slaved to it. I turned the thing on, and it sounds like it's going to blow up, so I unplugged the SCSI drives. Boot the the Jaguar CD and install. I lost control of the mouse pointer when the registration screen showed up, and was forced to reset. At the screen with the apple logo and the spinning thing at the bottom (real technical, aren't I?), the machine froze, and 2 horizontal lines that look like static appeared. Reset again, and it booted up OK.
Went through the registration screen, and got to OSx. I can't drag anything. Finder periodically quits and restarts. The drive is churning and churning, but the machine is so slow that it is almost unusable. Installed 10.2.6 Update. It goes through, reboots, and the static-y boot screen again. Only this time, I try about 10 times, but rebooting doesn't help.
Reinstall (must have been a fluke, right). Once it comes up, I see that all of the iApps (iMovie, iPhoto, and iTunes) have icons on the dock that look like folders, instead of their normal icons. Install 10.2.6 update. Same static boot screen.
So I decide to install it on a different drive, one of the stock SCSI's (the 20GB is my music drive, and it's NOT getting initialized). Installation halts about 5 mins. into the install on one drive, and then 10 minutes in on the other.
I left it alone for a while, but then I got mad. I ripped out all of the drives, and plugged the 30GB system drive in where I had the 20GB (master to the CD-ROM's slave). Boot up, Install, Run update, install all software, everything's perfect. The machine exceeds expectations based on the fact that it is only a 66 MHz speed bump over my Beige. Bus speed really makes a difference.
So now, I'm left with these questions: Why did the IDE channel it was on make a difference? Are the IDE controller issues in the Rev. 1 B&W's really that screwy? If I decide to add another IDE drive later (for classic), should I invest in a controller card, or should it be OK?
Thanks
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