Cool! how'd you get a loose cover like that?

found it on ebay

yea those systems are low on the value list of macs. Which is a shame. They are just as functional! You want to see overpriced? Watch Ebay for 840AV items. I recently sold my 840av locally for $300 and it looked like someone had chucked it out of a moving truck. New, unbroken plastic parts for it go upwards of $100.

crazy.

I had my fun with her, and broke even. Its hard to get luckier than that in this hobby.

ahh some bad news... past few days when I turn it on the drive clicks a bit but will eventually spin and boot. Have to restart once or twice first.

Today, it refuses to go. Probably dead. Luckily I had backed up my install to the 540MB external SCSI drive and can still boot off of it and use the machine. Doesn't detect the internal drive at all. It was a 250MB Apple branded Quantum drive so it'd be a good opportunity to CF card this sucker.

fair warning!

The apple branded hard drive utility will not format ANY drive that is not apple branded. (Because fuck you, that's why) You will need to hack the utility to make it a 'universal' format utility.

This is why people can sell "apple branded" hard drives on ebay for 2-3X what the identical universal drive sells for. I've done this (the hacking), it is relatively simple. Basically you get the sd card's name, add it to the white list, internal to the program, and go from there. For example, it by default only works with a few seagate drives models. A simple edit allows ANY seagate drive. Naturally this is beyond the normal user so....

Also, Stick to 2gb cards. The partition size limit is 2gb iirc.

Good to know, thanks!

It's actually not an issue, really. Hacking the Apple HDD Setup tool is easy as hell and after that, it will no longer check the drive's firmware for the "Apple Computer, Inc." string. Or you can use a third-party tool to init the hard disk. Another way it to use the PPC-only version of MacOS 8.0. It comes with a HDD setup tool which is not from Apple and works with every drive as well.