Home

Articles

Files

Links

DIY

Various



 

If you wish to thank
or forsten me...

  RSS

sterpin.net en français sterpin.net in english

Replacing the CD drive by a burner in a Blue & White G3

As usual, I cannot be responsible for any damage to your machines when you will experiment the following tutorial.

Why changing the CD drive ? In my case, for mainly 2 reasons:

- crashes and slowdowns when a CD is introduced in the drive
- slow burning process on an dying external SCSI burner connected to the G3

First things to do after buying the burner (here, in my case, a SamsumG 48 X 16 X 48):

1) remove ay CD off the drive
2) shutdown the Mac
3) unplug the power cable

4)

Remove the door's cache (this photo was made with the burner already in place !).

Open  the lateral door, then next localize the little spurs fixing the caches and smothly push to liberate them (big yellow arrows)
Then remove the screws which maintain the drive's craddle in place (and also here a ZIP drive) (small yellow arrows)

5)

Screws removed...and still the burner in place as I forgot to take the pictures before the operation :-(

6)

Unplug the cables to fully remove the craddle. Yellow arrows from left to right:
1) CD drive power cable
2) IDE connector of the ZIP drive
3) IDE connector of the CD drive
4) audio output cable of the CD drive

(The ZIP drive power cable is not shown on the picture)

7)

Remove the 4 screws which lock the drive inside its craddle.

8)

The 4 screws which maintain the CD drive inside the craddle, the two ones which fix the craddle in the Mac's chassis and the two caches.

9)

The burner in place and the old CD drive on the top of the craddle: connectors are located exactly at the same place in both the drives.

10)

Following the above instructions in a reverse order, we can rebuild the machine (pay attention the to connectors at the rear front of the burner).

Just a little detail (yellow arrow): the opening button on the burner's cache.

In my Samsumg burner, the opening button was circular and not proeminent at all. I cannot activate it through the cache's opening button. So, in an old CD-R, I cut a small piece I glue onto the cache's button to fill the missing gap between this button and the burner's button.

Back Top