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.

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