[G4] Switching internal optical drive to external case

[William Landen]

Short answer ... It should work fine.

Long Story...
A few years back I gave my sons iBooks that I found dirt cheap.  ~ 
$450...  My sons were 7, 5, and almost 2 years old at the time.  One  
day I hear my youngest son yell, Help!!! (while I am on a conference  
call with one of my clients) and then I hear something tumbling down  
the stairs.  Sure enough he dropped the iBook, completely ripping out  
the optical drive.  I tried to boot the iBook and nothing happened.   
Played with it a while an decided it was gone.  Put it to the side  
for a couple of weeks until I decided to take the memory out for my  
older son's computer.  I looked at the hinge and notice it was not  
all the way down on one side.  Made a fist and struck the top of the  
computer over that hinge and it snapped back in place.  Opened the  
computer and it booted right up like nothing had happened.  Hooked up  
a external DVD drive and it has been working ever since.  He uses it  
around 5 hours per week.

I gave my father in-law an even older Claim Shell i-Book that the  
Optical Drive just quit working and he still uses it for internet and  
e-mail.

Not all external drives are the same ... Some are extremely loud.


On Jan 10, 2007, at 8:25 PM, Richard Klein wrote:
> I figure her disc problems are probably from a failing IDE  
> controller on the motherboard, so maybe putting the drive in a  
> firewire case will let her get some use out of it.  How will the G4  
> (running OS X Tiger) deal with having an external optical drive,  
> but no internal optical drive? Has anyone tried this?