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| PowerMac G3 blue and white firewire ports help | |
| Posted by: Classicman on 2024-03-09 13:18:14 Hi everyone! I'm asking for help for my "new" blue and white PowerMac G3 400 Mhz that I'm refurbishing. Everything seemed to work and I was so happy! but I realized during the final test that the firewire ports don't work... I tried with both OS 9 and OS X... nothing. If I connect an external firewire HD "LaCie" (powered by its own power) it turns on from its standby state but is not mounted on the Mac desktop. In System Profiler the ports are detected but it does not show me connected drives. Obviously the firewire drive in question works if connected to another Mac. Can any of you help me? Is the firewire module (metal box) mounted on the logic board burned? or worse... has the controller firewire (if present) on the logic board burned out? Thanks to anyone who can give me some tips/advice. | |
Posted by: Phipli on 2024-03-09 13:24:44Hi everyone!It was a common failure mode, I can't remember if the plug in ports fail or the chip. @GRudolf94 do you remember? Mine came with the ports missing and I got a set from eBay thankfully. | |
| Posted by: GRudolf94 on 2024-03-09 21:28:02 IIRC it's the PHY that fails. What sits on the daughtercard. | |
| Posted by: Classicman on 2024-03-10 03:22:47 THANKS a lot friends !!! @Phipli @GRudolf94 so, I understood correctly: the daughtercard is the "metal box" module connected on the logic board? | |
Posted by: Phipli on 2024-03-10 03:25:59THANKS a lot friends !!! @Phipli @GRudolf94They, that's right. The tin box with two FireWire ports (not the modem one! | |
| Posted by: Phipli on 2024-03-10 03:27:19 There are lots on eBay, I searched "Blue & White G3 FireWire"  | |
| Posted by: Classicman on 2024-03-10 03:31:53 THANKS !!! your help / tips are so precious !!! | |
| Posted by: Dude.JediKnight on 2024-03-13 19:35:13 I remember that those FW ports weren’t bootable… but not if the daughterboard itself was required. Will the B&W work fine without one installed? | |
| Posted by: Classicman on 2024-04-01 13:13:00 THANKS a lot friends !!! @Phipli @GRudolf94 I have restored my two firewire ports! You were right, by changing the faulty firewire module with a "new" one everything works perfectly now! 🙂 The PowerMac G3 B&W is a great machine! excellent performance and what's more, all tantalum capacitors are soldered onto its logic board! Long live to ours PowerMac G3 B&W! | |
Posted by: Classicman on 2024-04-01 13:16:28I remember that those FW ports weren’t bootable… but not if the daughterboard itself was required. Will the B&W work fine without one installed?Yes, it works without that firewire module. | |
Posted by: Phipli on 2024-04-01 13:18:31THANKS a lot friends !!! @Phipli @GRudolf94Excellent news! Congratulations 🙂 | |
Posted by: GRudolf94 on 2024-04-01 15:03:04THANKS a lot friends !!! @Phipli @GRudolf94Nice, glad to hear. | |
Posted by: Snial on 2026-08-19 14:30:25It was a common failure mode, I can't remember if the plug in ports fail or the chip. @GRudolf94 do you remember?I think I have the same problem with my B&W G3/350. I managed to sort out a working FireWire drive enclosure and a suitable PSU (12V x 2A). It's a SATA one and I can attach a 3.5" 1TB drive to it and see that it works on my MB C2D. I'm making sure I treat it like SCSI, and never hot-plug it. However, it's unreliable on my B&W G3. I swapped FW cables, swapped the FW port on the G3 and later swapped the drive for a 2.5" 60GB SATA drive (in case it was a 128GB limit problem). All options are reliable on the MB, copying even a 512KB file fails 100% of the time on the G3. So, I think I'll have to buy a replacement G3 FW module, assuming I actually end up buying a non-bust one! And... I haven't forgotten the internal SATA drive and practicing with the hot air gun. Days are now cool enough for me to do something in the office and I have some aluminium trays to heat shield the other electronics (the kind of aluminium trays you get from a takeaway). I still need FW to work, if I want to do some DV video capture. So, your advice here looks like it's going to be pretty helpful! | |
| Posted by: Snial on 2026-08-20 02:12:34 Ok, so I’ve ordered a replacement module. As @Phipli had said earlier, they seem to be quite cheap. I can return it if it fails. I’ll be treating it like SCSI. Connecting before power on and disconnecting only after powering off. However there is one exception. I figure I can get away with unplugging a DV camcorder FW cable at the camcorder end, because it’s a mini 4-pin thing & shouldn’t have any power signals to short. Is that correct? I’ll still connect the Mac end before powering on. | |
| Posted by: Schmoburger on 2026-08-20 08:25:04 As others have said the firewire module was a weakness of the Yosemite G3 even back in the 2000's when they were pretty new. The revision 2 were a fairly rock solid machine otherwise. The revision 1 were a bit hit and miss, as they not only had the flakey firewire, but the ATA 100 controller that would often cause corruption issues with non-factory hard disks... there used to be a program to test for the issue, as not all machines or all hard disks were affected. it was very much a case of suck it and see. You'd run the program and it would just write and read back data to the disc and pick up any corruption and report back, When I bought my G3 way back a rev 1 300 was the only one in my price range, and I got lucky with it, as it threw no corrupt data even with a 40Gb drive in it. But I played it safe and ended up later buying an entire rev 2 board anyway and a 450mhz CPU and sold the old ones. One way to get around it was to plug the hard disk into the 66mhz bus with the CD drive but that wasnt really a great solution. But yes, back to the firewire, I always ensured anything was powered down wherever possible, but that said i never had issues with a firewire camcorder or a digital cam being hotplugged. Ymmv. | |
Posted by: Snial on 2026-08-20 08:45:50<snip> The revision 2 were a fairly rock solid machine otherwise. The revision 1 were a bit hit and miss, as they not only had the flakey firewire, but the ATA 100 controller that would often cause corruption issuesYes, my B&W/350 is a Rev 1 with an ATA 100 drive issue, so I did what you've suggested, I replaced the ZIP drive with a HD. I figure it's not fast enough for video editing though. As soon as I can, I plan to replace the Flash chip on my PCI SATA controller with a kindly donated Mac one and use an internal SATA drive. <snip> But yes, back to the firewire, I always ensured anything was powered down wherever possible,It's a pity FW had that problem, because in many ways it was far superior to USB, even USB 2.0 couldn't keep up in practice (despite the 480Mbit/s claim). but that said i never had issues with a firewire camcorder or a digital cam being hotplugged. Ymmv.I've never had problems with hot plugging a camcorder either, but I wanted to check. Until fairly recently I didn't even know FW chipsets could get fried by hot plugging. | |
Posted by: gsteemso on 2026-08-20 09:34:35Until fairly recently I didn't even know FW chipsets could get fried by hot plugging.I had never heard that at all until you guys mentioned it here. Is this an officially acknowledged shortcoming or something people have learned the hard way? I was under the impression that FireWire, like USB, was _designed_ to be hot-plugged. | |
Posted by: Schmoburger on 2026-08-20 09:36:47Yes, my B&W/350 is a Rev 1 with an ATA 100 drive issue, so I did what you've suggested, I replaced the ZIP drive with a HD. I figure it's not fast enough for video editing though. As soon as I can, I plan to replace the Flash chip on my PCI SATA controller with a kindly donated Mac one and use an internal SATA drive.Honestly i feel like the fragility of the firwire componentry on those machines was more machine specific than being an issue with firewire as an entire technology. I never really heard of any issues or had any with other machines, it was really only the ones based on the Yosemite logic board... basically the B+W G3 and the original Yikes G4 which was basically just a rev 3 G3 board, with firmware to run the G4 chip and with ADB deleted. I honestly found firewire to be overall a very fast, reliable and stable protocol for what it was designed for. It had great speed and bandwidth, without any of the inherent fickleness of SCSI and with the convenient on the fly connectivity of USB, without the oppressive speeds. As you said, even USB 2.0 was fairly ordinary in the real world, it was passable (which as a data transfer protocol, 1.1 absolutely wasnt), but nothing to write home about. | |
Posted by: Schmoburger on 2026-08-20 09:52:52I had never heard that at all until you guys mentioned it here. Is this an officially acknowledged shortcoming or something people have learned the hard way? I was under the impression that FireWire, like USB, was _designed_ to be hot-plugged. I beleive it was fairly specific to certain machines rather than an issue endemic to the entire protocol. bearing in mind the B+W G3 entered the market in 1999 and was one of the earliest onboard implementations of what was then quite a new standard. Fwiw i dont beleive Apple even really ever acknowledged it as a problem with the G3, and the fact that it and the Yikes were something of an intermediate step towards properly baked G4 systems that lacked the limitations of these machines, meant that Apple might have seemingly been given a repreive from ever having to address it as an issue, because by the time that it started to become a problem, the machines were now on their second owners after being replaced by Sawtooths, DA's, QS etc. Many were bought as servers in their first lives, which meant that they never really had any issues with firewire hotplugging as it never happened, and it only seemed to be later in the early 2000's after the iMac DV came out that hotpluggable external FW drives gained popularity. so by that time, presumably a lot of pro users had already upgraded to G4's. it was the people that either chose to upgrade their G3's, or purchased them secondhand/refurbished that were probably the ones that started discovering the limitations of the hardware in these specific machines. Granted, we were already well aware of the issue at my school in 2003, as we fried the firewire on our heavily upgraded video editing G3, and it turned out to be a known problem already by then on the forums. We never had an issue with any other machine type however, just the G3. Imac DV's, eMac's, later G4's, icebooks.... all were fine, In the case of our G3 i beleive we ended up putting a VST card in it which bypassed the need to use the onboard ports altogether. the inability to boot from it or boot into target disk mode was irrelevant, as the G3's didnt come with this capability anyway. | |
| Posted by: treellama on 2026-08-20 10:00:16 This all aligns with my experience with the the onboard FireWire on the B&W G3: it merely saves you a PCI slot until it dies, and then you put a FireWire card in if you still need it. From the Sawtooth on, the onboard is rock solid. | |
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