Hello! I've been away for a bit - busy with work and just doing life. Anyway, I've had this B&W G3 sitting in my closet for a few months. It was in disrepair when it came to me with a busted case, bad optical drive, no RAM and a questionable stock HDD.
I've installed 768MB PC100 I had lying around, got a fresh install of 8.5.1 running on an 8GB 50mb/s CF and taken most of the severely damaged (shattered in some areas) shell parts off.
To the point, the original hard drive still functioned but I replaced it after the machine would fail to boot after several minutes of waiting at the initial Mac OS screen. I was glad to be able to boot the machine finally, but the boot times are still not where they should be IMO. I've knocked the RAM down to one Apple stick of PC100 128MB in an effort to narrow down potential problems. I still think the problem lies with the boot disk as even booting from CD on a working optical drive takes several minutes at best.
My understanding is that the original UltraATA drives were 33Mbytes/sec. I am surprised that my 50Mbytes/sec CF showed little improvement. I mean, it sits at the Starting Up... message for a solid five minutes before displaying any extension icons.
Of course the culprit could lie elsewhere, but I haven't reasoned where quite yet.
Anyone running Mac OS 8? What are your boot times like on a similar machine? Ever seen this before?
Progress made.
I noticed that the Disk Setup utilities always listed the DVD-ROM drive before the CF and that it would take quite a long time for the drives to be discovered. In an effort to decipher which drive was causing hangups, I unplugged the DVD-ROM. The system boots in about 45 seconds now. Now I just need to figure out why the optical drive is causing issues. Probably jumpers. It is always jumpers.
The Jumpers are only one side of the dime:
If possible don´t use cable select - but instead master and slave setup !
But at the other side in the congiguration - there is also up to my memories -
a timeout defined for the drives to reply with volumenames
- and that timeout is set by default to 30 seconds !
That timeout may be set far less ( normaly 15 seconds to 16seconds are plenty enough ).
speedyG