Hi, it's been a really long time since I posted here - spent 6 years living in a small space with no room for ludicrous hacking projects. Thus no need to bother decent folk with stupid questions.
I now live in a much larger space which has lead to me pulling my G4 Colour Classic out of storage to get up and running again and put to work. Time hasn't been kind to it though, physically it's all still there but the internal hardware has obviously now had enough. Originally it was a B&W G3 upgraded with a sonnet G4 Zif, ATX PSU and Touch screen LCD.
After weeks of kernel panics, freezes and all kinds of bizarre behaviour (plus it was REALLY noisy), I gave in and decided to buy a cheap G4 and go to work on that - seeing as the similarities in mobo size/PSU would make this hack one that I could (seemingly) accomplish with not too much hassle.
So far I've taken the whole G4 apart, and tested out how the various components will fit in the CC case.
However, I'm now faced with a weird problem.
I cannot get the G4 to boot up. It will power up but there's no start up chime, and I can't reset the PRAM. I've tried two HDD's both with 10.4.11 installs…
All the wires/components are back in place (albeit scattered across my floor) and the graphics card is seated correctly, as is the memory.
It couldn't be that the G4 internals need the case for some sort of grounding maybe? I've had a G3 233 & G3 B&W taken apart in this manner before with no need for shielding or grounding.
Has anyone ever taken one of these apart and transplanted the guts into some other case?
Or am I just being a complete idiot?
Thanks in advance.
Are you using the power supply that came with the Quicksilver, or the one you were using with the B&W board? IIRC the pinouts are not the same between the two.
The ever-useful PSU comparison chart:
http://www.outofspec.com/frankenmac/wire.shtml
...and ATX to Quicksilver conversion:
http://atxg4.com/quicksilver.html
I'm looking forward to some photos. I'm having a very hard time imagining how a G3 or G4 motherboard could fit in a CC. You must mean an 867 Quicksilver. And I expect you are using the Quicksilver PSU since the power connector is 22pin on the QS rather than 20 on the G3 PSU, and I believe the QS motherboard will not even power on, chime or no chime, without the correct PSU. By "power on," you just mean the fans all start spinning? I don't think there's any grounding in the QS case as I recall hooking up a QS motherboard on a tabletop once to test it out. Which video card are you using? That could be the culprit. So you tested out the G4 to see if it was fully functioning before you took it apart?
Typically, those mods involved yanking the CRT and analog board and replacing them with a small LCD. This opens up enough space to stick a G3/G4 board in the rear case diagonally, standing on edge. I'd link to some photos but Kan-chan's CCSCC site is gone, and sadly archive.org wasn't able to snapshot it at any point.