Your USB card should be one with the NEC controller chip on it.

Then it will work in both Mac OS 9 (as USB1) and in Mac OS X (as

both USB1 and USB2).

I've heard, but not tested myself, that USB cards with Texas Instruments

chipsets work too.

To get OS X on an IDE drive, it must be installed on the first partition of the drive and that partition must be 8GB or less.

This can be overcome with the use of a Sonnet ATA/100/133 card. I know this because that is exactly what I have in my Beige G3 and I was able to install 10.4 via xPostFacto on a 40GB IDE drive with only 1 partition. My ROM is Rev A and I have upgraded the PMU to the Raytheon model as suggested on other sites.

Once you have OS X installed you can install Shadow Killer (available from Unsanity) and get some faster GUI speeds going on. Since you are planning on installing a PCI Radeon card, you can also installed PCI Extreme and have full use of the QE environment. With the specs you listed and an upgraded CPU, max RAM and fast IDE Controller OS X should run pretty nicely on that system.

I've done a bit of extensive tinkering with my BeigeG3MT so if any help is needed, I'll be more than happy to lend a hand.

ATA cards show up as SCSI devices to the system bypassing the IDE issues with OSX on a beige G3 (also means once they are formatted on that card they cannot be used on the built in IDE bus).

There were three revisions of the Beige G3 ROM: -A (LROG434-01/02), -B (LROG434-02) and -C (LROG434-03), and all with part no 820-0954. There are five subspecies of the Rev. A, but none of them allows more than one drive on each ATA bus. Loose Rev. B ROMs seem to be scarce, but Rev. B or Rev. C (the latter being far commoner) will allow two drives (master/slave) on a bus.

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While OWC's effort to document the Beige G3 ROM was noble, they failed miserably.

Ignore the markings on the circuit boards. Those are unusable because the different ROM chips will fit on any circuit board.

Check the numbers on the ROM chips on the ROM DIMM. Those are definitive. Now unfortunately, I don't remember the part numbers for the various revisions any more. The chips ending in 401 and 402 are the Rev. A. I've posted the other numbers to various lists somewhere, but can't remember where. Oh well.

ahh actually no. I have a rev a gossamer and it came with a SCSI drive and no IDE drive at all. we later added a 40GB IDE drive, but when time came to put OSX on it we had to buy a 9GB SCSI drive because it would not work off of the IDE drive.

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You might double check that. I also have a rev A G3 (bought the 266 G3/AV MT model brand new in 1997). It shipped with a 6GB IDE hard drive, ATAPI CD-ROM drive (different IDE channels, both masters), and SCSI zip drive. Some server and BTO models shipped with an ATTO or other re-branded SCSI card and a fast (for the time) Ultra2 SCSI hard drive, but ALL G3 models boot from IDE/ATAPI master devices just fine unless they are suffering from a hardware defect.

Peace,

Drew