On Thu, 26 Jul 2001, Michael Wolfson wrote:

> In the first generations of PowerMacs that had IDE busses, Apple didn't
> intend to use the slave.  That's why they had two busses -- one for the
> hard drive, and one for the cdrom.  Around the time of the Beige G3's
> (ISTR), they changed their IDE chipset so that it could use slaves in
> MacOS, and could boot from slaves.  I think there were a few IDE wrinkles
> up to the time of the blue and white G3's

  I haven't really been following this thread, so this might be totally
useless information... But, I can tell you that the first line of Beige
G3s (I have a 233Minitower) does not support IDE slaves. If I recall
correctly there is a revision number or other identifier somewhere on the
motherboard that you can use to distinguish between 1st gen beige G3s and
later generations (which did support slave mode, supposedely), but you'll
have to do some googling for that :)

Mike