i bought a Macmini G4 a few weeks ago and the dvd drive was broken (the laser pickup was broken off). I went online and bought a similar drive (CW-8124C). The problem is that the macmini won't recognize the drive. It boots up macos but it sayes no drive. I'am a bit loost here, need some advice.

Advice for fixing that drive, or for installing MorphOS without a DVD?

advice for fixing drive, but if threre is a way I can install Morphos without a DVD then I want to know.

@DrMaybe:

Installation via USB-stick is your friend. Here's a detailed guide (link).

The problem when replacing optical drive in Mac Mini is - you need exactly the same model, not a similar one. I've once tried replacing the drive with the one from a PowerBook and although theoreticaly it should work - it didn't (the same symptoms you're describing).

A CW-8124C CDRW/DVD-ROM drive should work in the Mac Mini, so if it isn't being recognised then probably it too is faulty, and maybe you should consider sending it back for a refund. It could of course be the mini PCB board, but that's unlikely if the HDD is working OK.

I have a few spare DVD drives for Mac Minis that I can sell/send you if you still want a DVD drive, as they are very handy to have working, but it's up to you if you want to replace the drive for a working one.

The drive I have in my Mac Mini, was not the original unit, which would have been a UJ-845C or UJ-846C, but I have a UJ-875C drive fitted though the UJ-85J-C/D is also a good replacement though all these models are DVD±RW-DL drives, and compatible with the MacMini.

There is a UJ-875 drive for sale on that well known auction site for £8 (or best offer) plus shipping (£2.11) but it may only be to buyers in the UK, but that seems very reasonably priced. However, if you could not get one any other way, if you were to send me the money for that model then I could send it on for only whatever extra it cost for shipping to Norway to you, which you may want to consider.

I would try the Best Offer option in any case, so if the seller will sell it for less then that lower price would be the price you'd owe to me. Maybe a PM if you're interested.

[ Edited by NewSense 03.06.2018 - 20:02 ]

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Start here:
http://www.morphos.de/guide/usb-boot

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I thought that too, BUT, as you can read above, I currently have a UJ-875C, and I've had a UJ-85J-C drive installed and as a stop-gap I had a CW-8123/8124C drive, but that was swapped out for a UJ-845-C drive soon afterwards.

If you are installing Mac OSX then it actually loads the device driver into the firmware, and the issues you have mentioned of it seeming to be that the only DVD/CDRW drive that will be recognised is the original drive, BUT if you do a fresh/NEW installation of Mac OSX then it loads in the firmware it needs for a specific drive, and in some way "locks" that into the OS so then you do need the same DVD/CDRW drive after that, until you do another fresh installation, at least those have been my findings, and I hope they are of some use to other users .

I will check the usb option first. The drive i bought is from a power mac g5 and I bought it from ebay, a german company that sells recycled parts.

The main issue is that the drive is probably a slave drive and you need an ide master device.

Only very rare slim drives have a jumper to change that. Usually the master/slave behavior is handled by the Firmware of the drive.

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You mean iMac G5, right? The PowerMac G5 has a standard size 5,25" optical drive that is almost as big as the Mini itself.

Success!? I mangaged to boot from usb, but only to Morphos shell. However an execute startup-sequence and I was in Ambient. The installation went flawless, but I need the usb stick to boot? The installer created the boot HFS partition (maybe not sett bootable). The DVD drive is still not working. Geit might be right with the slave and master drive. Crazy idea!! if I take the pcb from the broken one and insert it in to the new one, will that work? , someone tried??

Can you boot from the alt-key boot menu? If so, it is down to the OpenFirmware. If your drive is not detected as master, OF may ignore it. You can force it to boot from it thought using setenv commands.

HFSSetMacBoot bootinfo.txt fixed the problem with booting.
Only some problems with networking (i can get online, but some errors are comming up)
Is the tcp/ip stack slow or is it just the age of the hardware? or maybe releated with some of the config errors I get. Most of the faults are missing config files in ENV:sys/net
Last thing will be to mount network drives.
Then morphos is working perfectly.

> Is the tcp/ip stack slow

Yes, the stack and the driver-sided SANA-II interface.

But some other equipment in your network can also affect to the speed, because some people used to report really slow speeds... at least earlier. While I, for example, get full 100Mbps in my LAN and full speed from my 10Mbps Internet connection, which seems pretty fine for me.

> I [...] get [...] full speed from my 10Mbps Internet connection,
> which seems pretty fine for me.

Yes, of course, whereas others getting the same 10 Mbps from their 100 Mbps Internet connection may not seem exactly fine for them ;-)

Yeah, but I was trying to ask (should had written it less indirectly and better wording), that if his transfer speeds are slower than "normal" speeds under MorphOS. I remember that some people had some almost unusable speeds with certain configurations... which were way way less than 10Mbps.

Let's word it more properly...

@DrMaybe

What kind of speeds you get, what should you get, what protocol you use to measure it, and what do you consider as slow? :)

I used MorphOS a little bit now and fixed some things like deficons not working. I also disabled Inetd in the startup because it gave me some error messages (missing config). A lot of errors in the network startup actually, ended up with making some blank files in EVARC:sys/net. Deficons did not work because of some missing dirs. So a lot of quirks had to be done in the system after install.

Well, when i testet Morphos the networking seemed slow, but I have mounted some network drives and transfering files over my network I get around 50Mbit (+-). Which is the limit on my network because of some bottlenecks. Rendring pages in OWB is still slow but that have to do with processor power.

BTW are there some information about the InetD command ? how to set it up ?

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These are huge red flags. Something is really wrong with your installation. This is not normal whatsoever and I am quite surprised nobody else has commented on this earlier.

The installation was not perfect for sure, but do work. I'm thinking about doing a new install to get rid of all those hiccups the system currently have. All the system fiddling reminds me of the amiga days where I never used an installer, but did everything manually. Programs never worked flawless :)

are Chrysalis pack ment to work in morphos 3.10? it did not work for me straight away. It reported that i need morphos! So i changed the version and revison check in the install script. Then I managed to run the install and it did install some of the programs before reporting new errors and quiting.

conclusion! need a new install of morphos

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Please use the official MorphOS installer which has been thoroughly tested and will do a great job. Please do not attempt to install MorphOS "manually".


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A new version of Chrysalis to be used with MorphOS 3.10 is still being developed. Previous versions do overwrite many system settings files. Manually forcing Chrysalis to install on an unsupported version of MorphOS is highly likely to mess up your MorphOS installation. Please do not attempt to do this again.

The applications included in Chrysalis can be downloaded and installed separately anyway.

Stupid question, but gonna ask it anyway. What is the best way to do a clean install? reason I ask is I tried to boot from my usb stick, but it just boot my normal system from HD. Tried to run iwizard and it reports that there is no dos disk!?? Do i need to delete the partitions? And boot up.

I used HDconfig and deleted all the partitions and installed morphos again. No it's rock stable and i got the full morphos experience :). Last thing to do; fill out the register form and send it in.

@ DrMaybe

I am glad you were able to solve your issues.