Just recently I upgaraded my veteren biege G3 running at 266Mhz with a Sonnet 1000Mhz card which has added a bit of sparkle to my computing. I continue to use OS 9.2.1. I also have a second back up HD installed, But my thought is that now with the machine running fast enough to upgrade the OS, I might load the second drive with OSX and then swap around when I need to use older software. Is this possible or do I need to use a partitioned single HD? Any thoughts?
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Old biege G3 upgrade
- Thread starter goliah
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Your G3 will run MacOS X 10.2.8 out the box and later versions of MacOS X with XPostFacto. MacOS X is intended to coexist with MacOS 9 on a single partition. You may install it on a separate partitiion, but that is not necessary. If you want to preserve your installation of MacOS 9, you will need to non-destructively convert its file system to HFS+.goliah said:
Your machine can do Jaguar natively, or Panther or Tiger with Postfacto. You may want to up the RAM to its max of 768MB and install at least a Rage128 card, though preferably one of the Radeon 7000/9200 cards or a flashed PCI FX5200.
Slightly on topic...
How easy was it to install the 1 GHz G3 upgrade? I've been thinking about getting one for my Power Mac.
How easy was it to install the 1 GHz G3 upgrade? I've been thinking about getting one for my Power Mac.
While OS X can coexist with 9, I've found that when using XPostFacto, Classic and direct-boot-9 are more stable when installing X to a separate partition than 9, then installing a SECOND copy of 9 on the OS X partition to use just for Classic. (It only matters if you plan on dual-booting regularly. If you plan on using X exclusively, go ahead and stay with one partition.)
One thing to consider is the beige's 8 GB ATA limit. OS X must be installed on the first partition on a given drive, and that partition must be under 8 GB. (Use 7.7 to be safe.) This is due to a limitation in the beige's hardware, and can only be fixed by using a SCSI hard drive, or an add-in hard drive controller. (This only applies to ATA drives.) It can be on ANY ATA drive, but it must be in the first 8 GB. The installer will warn you of this.
So if you have a drive larger than 8 GB you want to install on to, you will need to partition it. (It doesn't have to be installed to the 'primary' drive, and it will recognize larger drives/partitions that aren't the boot drive, but it can only boot from a max-8-GB partition.)
One thing to consider is the beige's 8 GB ATA limit. OS X must be installed on the first partition on a given drive, and that partition must be under 8 GB. (Use 7.7 to be safe.) This is due to a limitation in the beige's hardware, and can only be fixed by using a SCSI hard drive, or an add-in hard drive controller. (This only applies to ATA drives.) It can be on ANY ATA drive, but it must be in the first 8 GB. The installer will warn you of this.
So if you have a drive larger than 8 GB you want to install on to, you will need to partition it. (It doesn't have to be installed to the 'primary' drive, and it will recognize larger drives/partitions that aren't the boot drive, but it can only boot from a max-8-GB partition.)
Ive herd the Radeon 9200 has a few problems with the Beige G3 in OS 9.x i dont know if its true or not. Ive seen people with the Radeon 9200 installed on there Beige G3 on the apple Disscussion forums and they say it works great I my self didnt have the money to buy a 9200 so i opt for a 7000 it is not as fast as the orignal radeon and the 9200 cause the 7000 dont have the TCL engine on it and it relys on the cpu for it insted of the card
Yeah its possible to do so. i have a beige desktop with a 350mhz g3 overlocked to 366mhz/384ram/ and i have 2 40gig hds in it. one in the bottom where its normally located, and another one on the top level next to the cd drive, right above the zip drive(if u have one). works well with 2 hds in it. one has osx and one has backup files on it. hope that helps
madmax_2069 said:
Hadn't hard about the 9200 problems.
As for the 7000, it is the same core logic as the Radeon, full onboard T&L. It's just slower. I had an original Radeon in one beige, and a 7000 in the other, otherwise identical specs between the two computers; and most OpenGL games were within 5% of each other.