Beige G3 not reading burned CDs

[Yoda]

Thought I'd best move my troubleshooting to this area rather than Finds/Conquests - it's not feeling quite like a conquest at the moment!

Aside from it missing the floppy drive entirely, I've been trying to perform a clean install of MacOS 9.2.2. I downloaded the iso from the Garden on a G4 PowerBook, and burned it to CD with Toast. It mounted on the PB as normal.

when inserted in the G3, it says the disk isn't formatted and asks if I want to do that. I thought the drive was probably faulty, but it reads a couple of iBook install CDs just fine (even allowed me to install AppleWorks 6 from one), and it also read a CD I had burned a couple of years ago, but I don't remember how I did that.

I know I had this issue with another Mac in the last year or so but can't remember how I resolved it. Is there a trick to burning CDs on (say) a G4 PowerBook running Tiger, or a better way of doing it to get a CD the G3 can read?

I was going to use a SCSI2SD v5.5 external instead, but it won't connect because of the casing. A BlueSCSI DB25 external does connect, but the G3 doesn't read it.

 

[Yoda]

A secondary question.... I recently switched out a dead CD drive in my G4 iMac for a Pioneer burner. Is there a suitable drive I could get for the G3 which is compatible, allowing for Mac OS 9, and the mounts, etc.? I kind of assume that an early Pioneer model would maybe work since those seem to be what I've seen in a lot of later Macs.

 

[speakers]

Yeah, this generation of machine can be picky with CD-R media. I've had better luck with DVD drives.

However, one trick that may work with your reluctant CD drive is to burn your CD image onto a DVD-R disc. This has worked for me on a number of occasions.

 

[Yoda]

That's an interesting idea, and well worth a try!

 

[3lectr1c]

Old CD-ROM drives can indeed be incredibly picky about properly reading burned disks. In particular, my 12" iBook G3 Snow has immense difficulty booting from burned CDs, which made it an absolute nightmare to get Tiger installed on when I got it (was in 2020 and I didn't have nearly as many resources as I do now). I eventually bought a FireWire cable and used target disk mode to install Tiger onto its drive from my eMac.
Anyways, for your situation, it can often help to burn disks at the lowest burning speed that your drive supports. 4x or lower if possible. Doing this satisfies my Clamshell drives, but the darn G3 snow still gives me issues even with that. That drive is particularly bad at it though, I've had much older drives that are much less picky. So give that a go, I think the SuperDrives support 4x burns, some newer drives I've seen in PC laptops don't. You should be able to pick the speed in disk utility when you go to burn the disk.

 

[Yoda]

I can't remember how it was that I burned the CD-R which the G3 reads perfectly - it's an Office 98 installer, so I likely made it when setting up my G3 snowbook, so I may even have burned that on my 2016 iMac, using Toast 9 and a superdrive. I'll keep trying, but the idea to burn at lowest possible speed makes a lot of sense. And there's no guarantee that my G4 PB burner is good anyway.

I do have a PCI USB card on the way which I think is the right one for this system, but I think the system installer will only install devices it can actually detect - and I don't have a floppy drive to install the drivers from that - so it can all wait for the card to arrive.

The Zip drive on the G3 is working, but my external USB Zip drive doesn't appear to be, so I can't even use that to move drivers etc over to it.

I have bought a correct floppy drive from eBay, but I see no way to mount it in the plastic slots provided in the G3 chassis, so will maybe be able to use that with the top case off to get drivers installed.

Ultimately, I ought to be able to grab stuff via my iMac and the network, but I'll try and get the 9.2.2 installer ready to use first!

 

[3lectr1c]

I’d invest in a USB card for it, it would make file transfer much easier. Make sure it’s Mac compatible though, I havent looked into the requirements for that before.

 

[Yoda]

I've got a PCI USB card on the way - it claims to be Mac compatible. I will likely have no easy way to get the drivers onto the system though, since it has no floppy drive, a not really working CD, and though the Zip is good, I don't have a Zip drive for any other system.

USB would be my data connection of choice for this though, and it'll be a relief to get just about anything on it working!

 

[3lectr1c]

I think the OS shouldn’t need any drivers to use it?

 

[Yoda]

Maybe I'm confusing it with my Lombard. I plugged a USB card in the PC Card slot and it didn't recognize it at all in OS 9.1 - after downloading extensions from the Garden and dropping them in the system folder, it worked.

I read somewhere that when Mac OS 9 installs, it only drops the drivers for the hardware it detects, which is why it didn't surprise me I had to do that on the Lombard. I'd be very happy if the PCI card works without anything else needed however!

 

[3lectr1c]

Not sure.

 

[Yoda]

No big deal - I'll find out in due course. It's made harder by the fact I can't get any files on or off the G3 at present, so no way to load drivers if it needs it, but there will be a way, if I play with it long enough.

Incidentally, is there such a thing as a SCSI 'extender'? Something I can use to extend the SCSI port on the back to try getting the SCSI2SD connected? That might work, but I can't plug it in because the G3 case doesn't give it enough space.

 

[3lectr1c]

You could get a cable I’m sure that hooks up to the scsi to sd and the port. I’d say the easiest thing to do if to just pull the hard drive and put it in a newer IDE mac (if you have one) that has USB.

 

[Yoda]

Sadly, I don't have a newer Mac, but pulling the drive and hooking it up to something else is a great idea I hadn't even thought of. Which got me thinking that alternatively, I'm going to replace the HD anyway at some point, so I could drop the replacement into another system to get it set up. And I might have the answer. If I replace the drive with an IDE-CF, I can maybe plug the CF card into me Lombard via the PC Card slot and an adapter, and then run the 9.2.2 installer on the Lombard, with the CF as the destination drive.

That might actually work! And there would be room on the CF for all the installers I need, including any for the PCI USB card.

 

[Yoda]

Or, actually it might not - that would give me a Lombard-based 9.2.2 system on the CF card. Might be enough though!