Beige G3 hardware question

I have tow of these and they are finicky beasts as they get older.

Try replacing or reseating the batterey, and zapping PRAM. I know the original batterey has got to be toast, so it ma be time for a new one, and if it sat idle for a while that may have a lot to do with it.

boz2004 said:

OK, I've not done either of those before, and before I do, what sort of fall-out might I expect? Assuming the replacement card doesn't work out, where is a good place (and what's the likely cost) for a good battery?

As for the unit: prior to my attempt to correct the audio issue, the unit booted up fine and was one of the best Macs I've owned (this is my third)... I'd narrowed the problem to the audio card and initially took the stance that if it's working, I'd deal--in part b/c I'm not the most hardware savvy--so it hasn't be idle... perhaps I should've taken my own advice and left well-enough alone

thanks for the input

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You can pick up A PRAM battery at your local Radio Shack for about 20 bucks. They are even nicely labeled as an Apple Macintosh battery. On the back, there will be a little "Replaces ..." guide. Match the numbers from your old battery and you are on your way.

Try the pram. I'm don't know the key off hand (try google) but it's something like.... press cmd+option+p+r during boot up. You should then hear the start up chime I keep holding till I have heard it twice. Then let go and see if it will boot.


If that does not work try and Boot with the extensions turned off.

Good Luck

If that doesn't help, unplug everything on it, including the powercord and get the battery out. If you are lucky, after a couple of hours it should work again fine. Els leave it for a couple of days. I had the same with my G3 B&W. This was the only thing that helped!!

Sometimes you need to reseat the memory chips...

Sometimes you need to reseat the memory chips...

And you can always reset the ROM if nothing else works...

okay, for pram zap, do what he said, except it needs to be at least 3 times (not sure why, but many a time have i tried just two, and 3 always works better)...

since you can't hear, you should be able to tell when it does it's thing, cause it'll get to a gray screen, and then it'll go black as it re-starts. after that, it'll go gray again. let it do this several times (at least 4, so you can be sure you got at least 3 zaps in )

if that fails, after you have the new card in, and after you have re-seated your ram, check the hard drive connection.

to be quite honest, this sounds like a problem i had on my beige - i was running 9.2.2 quite fine, but when i got my emac, i wanted to install a fresh 9.2.2 on it (didn't have system discs w/the beige, bought it from a school). so i transfered a fresh install on the emac to the beige and fired it up - it would get to the 9.2.2 splash screen, and then nothing. nada. not a thing. turns out that my install on the emac had a rom file in it that the beige wasn't too fond of, so i had to go back to my old install. which was a bummer, but i found out a very important thing:

when my beige hung like that, it was a software problem. yours could very well be too, and it may be the hard drive.

if you have an os 9 disc, pop it in and run some disc utilities to make sure everything's kosher...

matt

mkaake said:

when my beige hung like that, it was a software problem. yours could very well be too, and it may be the hard drive.

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This has been my experience as well - My Beige G3 is on quite a few steroids (G4/500ZIF, USB/Firewire card, ATA/133 card, 2nd graphics card, maxed out memory, 3 hard drives + internal Zip & CDRW) and whenever I've had boot hang problems they've most always been software-related. Although I'm now only running OSX, I've encountered this situation when running OS9 as well, and here are a few suggestions:

* Take out the USB card for the time being, and only re-install it once you have a working copy of 9.2.2 running on your machine.
* Take out any 3rd party graphics cards you may have installed and run the machine using the on-board graphics until you have a working copy of 9.2.2 completely installed.
* Disconnect anything that isn't Apple OEM from your system board and peripherals.

Also, I know from experience that the sound cards on the Beige G3s are hard to seat, so gently double-check it to make sure that it is completely settled.

In this circumstance, I'd suggest completely reinstalling OS9, and if you have backups of your data, I'd even go as far as wiping the hard drive with Apple Disk Utilities and re-partitioning. Remember, if you ever plan to run OSX, the first partition on the first HD must be less than 8GB on the Beige G3s.

Install and update OS9 completely on the system, and only then start installing your extra cards and non-Apple OEM stuff. Install these one-by-one, and reboot after each installation.

It has been my experience that the Beige G3 is *very* finicky about installing software and cards, but once they're on it runs rock solid. You might want to also check out Other World Computing's OS9 helper (they also have an OSX helper) for installation.

Be patient - remember you're working on a system that's now approaching 6-7 years old, so stuff that you could get away with when it was newer might not always work as well now that the hardware has a few thousand hours of runtime on it.

Good luck! I love my Beige G3, it was and is a very versatile system (although I'd love a Revision B G5 even more now).