So Monday I finally got the RAM upgrades I’ve been wanting for the iMac G4 that sits by my bedside, so I was able to install those, replace the PRAM battery, and install the AirPort card I was gifted a month or so ago. I still want to upgrade the 80GB hard drive at some point before it fails, but I’m trying to limit the number of times I have to take it apart to make these upgrades, so I also need to decide if I’m going to upgrade the CD/DVD drive to something newer and faster.

After I got the upgrades in place I hooked it up to one of my old USB hard drives, a 500GB beast I call Black Box. I don’t remember what computer I originally used this with, possibly my old Intel iMac? But it’s old, and it is slow. Moving files onto it was taking some serious time, and it got to a point where anytime I tried to move more than like 100MB of data over to it the iMac would freeze up when it completed and I’d have to restart. By the end of the night I was restarting it every ten minutes or so, sometimes without even managing to move a single archive over to the Box.

I realized eventually that the computer was probably overheating, and remembered that I did NOT apply fresh thermal paste to the heat pipe when I opened it up to replace the RAM – the paste looked pretty intact and I assumed it would still make adequate contact when closed back up again. I decided better safe than sorry, so I cracked it open again, cleaned off the old paste, and applied fresh, and it seems to be have resolved at least part of the issue.

The other part is, of course, the iMac still would crash after moving large chunks of data through it onto this hard drive. After a few different configurations, I think the Black Box itself is the common factor of these failures, so I suspect either the drive is failing completely, or something about the USB connection is causing it to surge during the transfer process. It connects fine to my laptop, so I can move data over to it that way, but then when I reconnected it to the iMac and just letting it run today, it still bombed out after about 20 minutes with an address error. I’m going to run some first aid on the drive and see if there’s anything wrong with it. I’ve had the drive disconnected now for about an hour, and the iMac has been running just fine in the background as I work on my laptop. So yeah, I think it’s something with the drive just not playing nice.

Worst case scenario, I’ll have to replace the drive. That wouldn’t be terrible. As I say, I’m planning to upgrade the 80GB internal drive already to an SSD drive, and could easily bump it up to a roomy 500GB drive. Thankfully I hadn’t moved TOO much data onto it yet, nothing I couldn’t back up to the laptop for a while as I do more testing. Maybe I can reinitialize the drive and start over. Either way, I’ve got options. And for now, the 80GB drive seems to have plenty of space on it to use the computer how I want to. So at least for now, getting this resolved is a kind of low priority.

And in the meantime, I’m just really enjoying the nostalgia hit of being able to play around in MacOS 9.2 again! It’s such a friendly interface, I really missed it.