Installation procedure for an XLR8 ZIF upgrade

[trogdor]

The box of used Beige PowerMac G3 upgrades I bought on eBay has finally arrived, consisting of

• A Wings personality card
• Three sticks of RAM, two of unknown size (probably 640MB; irrelevant since I already have 768MB - I'll test and resell)
• A VRAM SODIMM (presumably irrelevant since I have a PCI Radeon installed; also since it already had an upgraded VRAM stick when I bought it)
• A G4 upgrade, sold as "G4 but otherwise unknown". It has a serial number label starting with XLR8-, so I'm presuming (I think quite reasonably) that it's an XLR8 model. The chip is labeled as XPC7400 RX400PK, so I'm assuming it's an older-model XLR8 (the more recent models advertised on the semi-working website are XPC7410s) running at 400MHz (quicker than my current 333 even without including the effects of AltiVec).
• A 512K (I think) stick of L2 cache (presumably irrelevant, since I think that the XLR8 has its own L2 cache on board?)

All of this came on its own in a plastic bag - no accompanying software, thermal paste, razor blades, or documentation.

Can someone fill me in on the exact procedure for installing the XLR8 module? It's been pulled from a beige G3, so presumably the jumpers are already set correctly? I've read suggestions that a piece of proprietary software needs to be installed prior to installing the CPU - is this correct? Or can I install OS X and then install the software? Or is the software necessary at all?

Are there any common pitfalls made when performing this sort of upgrade that I should try to avoid?

Thanks for all suggestions!

[Turboladdade]

You should be able to find the appropriate manual here. With Mac OS X, I don't think you *need* any drivers with this thing, although there is XLR8's MachSpeed software, which lets you tweak it, but isn't required to run. It costs $16.95 and can be purchased here.

[trogdor]

Thanks, D; my thermal compound should be arriving tomorrow, so I'll let you know how I get on. *crosses fingers*

[trogdor]

Despite a new personality card and a new processor, the machine is still stalling during installation at the same point and in the same way as before.

Maybe I'll try a third hard drive. >:-|

[madmann]

you must be carful which ide hd you use.

you need an older ide 33 or maybe 66

but not a ide 133 your hd controller cant keep up with the drive. i had similar problems with my beige g3

[trogdor]

Thanks madmann, but one drive is actually the original that came with the machine (shurley no problems there) and the other has been working fine for the previous owner for some time.

[madmann]

well that is a problem

i had a great deal of issues with a beige g3 not sure what the issue was mostly the original hd controler i added a sonnet tempo no more issues

[trogdor]

I tried installing it via FireWire from my iMac, but OpenFirmware couldn't find an HFS partition. So I booted with both the OS X drive and the previous OS 9 drive connected, and re-XPostFacto-ed the OS X drive. That let it get as far as displaying a grey Apple logo on the screen, but then it kernel panicked, unable to find the replacement BootX that had been installed. Then it refused to boot back into OS 9 - even when I disconnected the OS X drive, it booted so far and then hung. I'm now completely fed up with this machine, and am selling the components on eBay. Hopefully I'll make back the money I spent, although the time is lost forever.