Hard drive compatibility question

[Eluon]

I recently came upon a nice Blue and White G3 tower at my sister's friends house. Man! She gave it to me for free. It is 300mhz with 256mb ram and has OS 9.2 on it. Runs like a champ, but I am wondering a few things about upgrades:

I have a dell with an 80 gig hard drive. Would this hard drive be able to be put in the G3? If so, how would I go about formatting it to install OS 9 or OSX on it?

Thanks for the help!

 

[CuteGothTech]

Read it, if it says ATA on it, then go ahead. What you do is put that one in, use an install disk and start the computer holding down the C key. It will start using the disk. If you don't have one, you need to get it from your friend or buy it. Then you initialize the hard drive, ( a window automatically pops up and asks you to) then you start the install, under options for install, you choose "erase and install" "Extended journaled" is the one. And you install the software.
tada! all done!

 

[disconap]

It might also say IDE (that's what they used to call what is now refered to as PATA). Essentially, if the cables in the b/w fit the drive, it is compatible...

If you want to use it as a storage/scratch drive (in other words, keep the OS on your already installed drive), just hook it up, set the jumpers to slave (google the drive model to find the correct setting), and just turn your G3 on. Use disk utility to initialize; this will NOT put the OS on it, but it will initialize it. You can then clone your existing hard drive to it, actually, if you use Carbon Copy Cloner (free utility, also google).

Good luck, those machines are workhorses and run great under OSX (and they hold up to a gig of RAM and can be upgraded to a 1gHz G3 or a 700mHz G4)...

 

[SmurfBoxMasta]

Being a 300 mhz unit, it is most likely a rev 1 model. They had the flaky ata controller chip on the mobo that would cause data corrpution if a 2nd HD was installed...........but you still can use the 80gb HD as a primary disk, you just have to take the other one out

lookie here for the details:

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G3-ZONE/yosemite/IDE/

And as the others have said, you will need an install CD to boot from & install an OS onto the drive. If you plan to install OS X, you will need (at least) another 512mb of ram though, preferably a total of 1GB, which is the max for those machines......