VOGONS


First post, by Woolie Wool

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It turns out that the beige DVD drive I ordered last year for my retro PC build (which is finally ready to be put together this weekend) was made by Apple of all people, SKU 678T0191. It has standard IDE connectors, a 6X speed, and was made in September of 1999 but I know nothing else about it and Google is very unhelpful. Is this going to work if I stick it in my retro PC? I'm especially concerned about MS-DOS because if it doesn't work as a standard ATAPI optical drive I might have to pull the color-mismatched (black, my case is beige), very slow CD-ROM unit from my Dell Dimension 4300 test mule.

wp0kyr-2.png CALIFORNIA_RAYZEN
1wpfky-2.png REDBOX
3q6x0e-2.png FUNKENSTEIN_3D

Reply 1 of 5, by SW-SSG

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Is something stopping you from just trying it? 😊

Historically, Apple has never made optical drives in-house - your drive should be a rebadged Matsushita (Panasonic) or Hitachi drive with an Apple label on it. It should function normally in a non-Apple machine.

Reply 2 of 5, by Woolie Wool

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Thanks for the advice. I'll just shove it in and see what happens. I'll be bringing the Dell anyway since I plan to pilfer a couple of its cards and many of its cables.

wp0kyr-2.png CALIFORNIA_RAYZEN
1wpfky-2.png REDBOX
3q6x0e-2.png FUNKENSTEIN_3D

Reply 3 of 5, by Malvineous

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Sometimes drives made for big-endian architectures seem to have the letters swapped in the names (e.g. the BIOS lists the drive as "aMstsuihat" instead of "Matsushita", every two letters swapped) but from memory those drives still work.

I've got a few old Apple CD drives but they're all SCSI though so no problems with interoperability there.

Reply 4 of 5, by yawetaG

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Yes, Apple IDE drives will work in a PC (they normally are relabeled drives from big manufacturers such as Hitachi and IBM). Just remember to reformat hard drives to whatever OS you're using on the PC, because Windows/Linux/Unix etc. usually can't read Apple file systems natively.

For CD-ROM drives the biggest problem is that drives from iMacs and the like will miss the normal drive bezel.

Reply 5 of 5, by bjwil1991

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Speaking of Apple and PC items that can be installed, I put in a 200GB HDD into my Apple iMac G3/600 in place of the 40GB HDD that was in there (was dying) after setting the limit to 128GB. I also put in two Apple HDDs in my PCs without issues, and I'm planning on installing the ZIP-100 in my Packard Bell to see what'll happen when I install it. As long as you format the HDD with the appropriate file system per OS (MS-DOS, Windows, Linux), you're good to go. In most cases, the disk creator programs in either MS-DOS (fdisk), Windows, or Linux (gparted) cannot read the HFS or HFS+ Apple file systems (I learnt that the hard way).

Heck, I have Linux and Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 installed on 1 HDD on my iMac G3/600 with no problems.

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