Alright. I got my hands ona 30 gig drive that I'm going to image with carboncopycloner/net restore on the g3 tower at my dads work. I also got the ram up to 256 megs with the 128 chip I got today. Hopefully this will become one smokin' machine. Its the fastest I've ever seeen os 9 run on a machine, so hopefull X is fast too. And not only was it my media, I realized this drive hates burned cd's, because it won't play any of the music i umm...bought on itunes and burned.... But my 100% legit B-52's and AC/DC cd's work..... Thanks for the help guys. Karma to you too jacob.

Post edited by: ubergeek89, at: 2004/10/05 06:25

I just caught up with this discussion and I have had the same experience. The iMacs from the contest needed to be reimaged and I had a very difficult time with the burned OS 9 cds that I had. The original cd worked just fine, but the burned ones would not. A little searching on the web unconvered somethine interesting. It seems that the faster you burn a cd, the more likely there are small flaws in the way it was burned. So if you are burning something like an installer cd for an OS, make sure you burn it at 4x. At 4x there is 0% chance you will get anything but an exact replica. I think it has to do with buffer underuns, but I really dont know. I have a very good 48x that has never had any probs EVER, until burning OS9 cds nd Linux cds. So just try it and see what happens. BTW, I picked that tip up in a linux forum where people were having problems getting the ISOs to burn. It worked for me!

Post edited by: krusher117, at: 2004/10/05 20:54

I'm reposting due to the MySQL error (I hate mysql) lol.
I got OS X.3 running on this boxx pretty well in the end. I had 2 Problems when trying to install before. The first was my media, unless the cds are originals (not burned) my drive had trouble, or didnt read the discs at all. My second Problem is that the iMacs firmware does not support booting a system from any drive larger than 8 gigs. So now all is well and this machine is pretty damn zippy for a 5 year ld system running panther.

Good Job! I remember when I had to do installs that my boss was convinced that all Mac's were required to have a 8gb boot partition. It was pretty funny when I saw his face when I did a setup on a B&W G3 Tower. I slapped a 40gb in there and installed just fine. Apperantly he had been doing the 8gb partition deal for over 6 months. I walked in as the PC guy, of course not knowing better, and just ran an install. Funny stuff.

Well, I'm glad that you now have a capable machine. Have you decided on what kind of mod's you are going to do to it?


Why I edited: Listed the wrong machine. I was thinking of a different machine while I was typing, but everything else was the same. :ohmy:

Post edited by: whitlock, at: 2004/10/09 04:09

as of now iPlan on putting a 4 inch cold cathode kit in ( not sure where iCan squeeze it) but i'll find/make space. iAlready hacked the hell out of a lacie usb cd burner casing to make it take any drive, not just the stock one (apple only supports lite-on drives when it comes to 3rd party burners) so iPut my 52x32x52x lite on drive in it and voila!

Post edited by: ubergeek89, at: 2004/10/09 10:34

In regard to the quality of those OS CD's, it very much depends on the dye and substrate used in the CD-R.

Your numbers are wrong.

No CD-R sold in the last 3 years has a dye optimized for less than 12x burns. That means that trying to burn a modern CD-R at 4x will result in [b]more[b] errors and bad burns, not less.

Accually thats incorrect... 3 years ago we were useing 10x burners at most. (affordably at least) cd-r's are designed to burn at any given speed up to what i beileve is 52x at this point in time.the slower the speed, the less chance you have with buffer underruns and faulty burns.

Just out of curiosity, krusher, what setup were you using for burning? What brand CD-Burner? What kind of interface? What speed computer? Were you doing something else on it at the same time? What burnign software?

I should think that buffer under-runs should be the easiest errors to pick up. The burning software runs out of data to send the drive, and it knows this, and it should tell you. In Toast, in my experience, if you buffer-under-run you are told promptly.

New drives have 2MB buffers on the drive and "BURNProof", which I believe is some sort of two way protocol for telling the drive to remember where it just wrote, and hold on a moment, because the computer needs to catch up to send more data.

However, I DO know that there can be problems with burning too fast on junky media and a few errors popping up. I don't think that they're errors due to buffer-under-run though, I think that they are simply due to the laser misfiring or the die not able to react fast enough all of the time.

Using my BenQ 52x24x52, I've never had a buffer-under-run (firewire interface). It's BURNProof and was $20 on newegg :P
I have never had these boot issues, but once. At 48x using 48x TDK media, I couldn't get a Debian/Sarge ISO to boot my PBG3 Lombard (but it would any other mac I tried). Switching to a generic brand solved it :P (I'm guessing that the media may have been growing old)

Post edited by: tutangeek, at: 2004/10/09 20:51

4x was the goal or standard for simple cyanine-based media until 2001 when Imation led the industry to adopt azo-cyanine which is presently optimized for 12x. So-called archival discs may use phthalocyanine, which they will tell you not to burn at less than 8x. Verbatim pushed super azo in 2002, which is optimized for no less than 24x and now the Japanese plants that make most of the discs do runs with different dyes for different manufacturers/tolerances, but to my knowledge, nobody makes a simple cyanine-dye CD-R anymore so burning at 4x is ill-advised.

Of course, your drive may be old and the laser quite weak, in which case you won't be able to burn anything but coasters at high speed. That's not an issue with the media.

You may still find some sites refer to 4x as an optimum burn speed, but they are ancient.

I've burned off enough copies of OS X (legal - had to. boss kept on scratching them up) to know that sometimes you just have weird burns. The install is touchy. You can use the same ISO and use the exact same CD on the exact same burner, and one will fail. It's really messed up, and I have no explination. Guess a MD5 checksum should be run before trying to install, but I bet that it would say that a bad disk was okay as well.