I'm a PC guy but love to mess around with the wife's Mac. The machine-G3 233 Beige Desktop. I've done cpu upgrade to G4 533....no problem. Now I have a fresh Western Digital 40gig HD and OSX Jaguar sitting here.I want to take out the old slow noisy 4 gig and put in the 40 gig and Fresh OS.What's the easy way to do this? After,can I put the 4 gig into the CDROM IDE line temporary to transfer data off? Please email me. Thanks

You'd probably be doing yourself a favour by purchasing and installing a new PCI ATA controller. I don't remember right off hand what the ATA speeds were, but my guess is about ATA/33, which, if you have a new HD, isn't going to be that friendly. Actually taking out and replacing the hard drive is cake. On the one I recently ripped apart, the hard drive is mounted on the bottom of the case. There's a plastic lever that, when pulled up, lets the HD chassis come out. Unscrew the old drive and put the new drive and, slide it back into the bottom, and you're set. You just have to hook the cables back up. Whether or not you can put the 4 Gig on the CD- ROM IDE line is questionable. Unless you have the newer ROM for the computer, slave drives are poorly supported. I seem to remember that there were two IDE channels, though, at least in the one I was working with. If there are, put the new drive on the third party ATA controller, the CDROM drive where it is, and the old HD on the second original channel. Or, if there is only one IDE channel, after the 40GB drive is installed, replace the CDROM with the 4GB, transfer the data, and replace the 4GB with the CDROM. And if you're running Jaguar - if your CPU upgrade is Sonnet, make sure to download their patch to let the upgrade run 10.2. Getting XPostFacto isn't a bad idea, either. ----paxcirc.a-

Also, unless you install an ATA controller, you'll need to create a less than 8Gb partition at the beginning of the new HD to install Jag onto. To be safe, I usually make this partition about 7 Gb, and then created another partition with the rest of the HD to use for data storage. If you're only going to be connecting the old HD to transfer data, you can just connect it in place of the CD-ROM drive and remove it after the data's moved. With a nice big drive in there, there's no real reason to leave the old HD connected unless you want to use it as a designated OS 9 (or whatever's on there) drive for running any old apps that don't work well in classic. -Wycke