Well I got the problem about upgrading a beige G3 out of the way, a friend of the family gave me a G4 AGP (sawtooth) that's been upgrade to dual 1.3's (Whoo Hooo). It still has the stock DVD-RAM drive in it, I want to upgrade to a DVD-RW DL, will all of them work as a boot drive? Or do I have to have a specific drive thats bootable (like the old G3 had to be).
Thanks
Techno_hick.
I know that in the old days you had to have an Apple ROM'd drive to boot from it, but I don't think that is the case any more.
This weekend I threw a generic ($60 from Fry's) "Emprex" brand 16X DVD+-RW drive into my B&W, and it boots fine. (Including from DVD-ROMs. I reinstalled OS X off a Powerbook G4 restore disk using it.) It did require installing a "PatchBurn" profile to work with iTunes, of course.
Of course, your mileage may vary.
--Peace
I can't speak of DVD drives, but for CD-ROM drives it's hit and miss with an IDE interface. On beige and B&W G3s, I've had some non-Apple cd drives able to boot, and some that won't - or will boot OS X but not 9.