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Beige G3 Desktop - probs with OS X

L

ltgator333

macrumors member
Original poster
My parents (formerly myself) have a rev A beige G3 desktop, originally equipped with a 233Mhz G3 chip, that I have upgraded considerably. It has a OWC mercury G4 zif @ 466Mhz, a powerlogix USB/Firewire PCI card, a Acard AHARD ATA 66 PCI card, Apple-supported CD-RW, 512Mb of RAM, maxed the built-in video's VRAM to 8Mb, and then has a 30Gb Maxtor ATA-133 HD connected to the Acard ATA host. As long as I had it, it always ran OS 9 and Yellow Dog without a hitch, never a problem. When I gave it to my parents, I also got a OS X 10.0 install disk and installed that, then upgraded it to 10.1.5 and it runs that OS without a problem all the time- it's used daily and frequently and is one of the most stable machines I've ever seen. Then came the point of wanting to upgrade to Jaguar and the problems. The installer would freeze midway through the install every time. I tried putting the stock G3@233Mhz back in and installing, taking out the USB/Firewire card and installing, and installing on a clean blank drive all with the same result. Occaisonally I did get the installer to go most of the way and had a bootable system, but this was rare and the system wasn't complete and there were problems. Can anyone maybe spot an obvious or even not so obvious cause to the trouble?
Thanx Much!
 
i never tried to install anything past os 9.2 on my beige g3-233 as it ran perfectly. Have you considered not upgrading it? os 9 should be plenty for that setup.
 
when the computer starts up press command-control-p-r then immediatly cammand-control-o-f

openfirmaware comes up type in "reset-all" without quotes

shold restart and this might help
 
I had an install problem on a Beige G3 266 with Jaguar as well. I had to remove all but one memory stick, install, then replace all of the memory. Using that method, everything worked great. Let me know if that helps 🙂
 
pepeleuepe said:
I had an install problem on a Beige G3 266 with Jaguar as well. I had to remove all but one memory stick, install, then replace all of the memory. Using that method, everything worked great. Let me know if that helps 🙂
Click to expand...

for me, i had to take out 3rd party video (actually prolly could have left it in), but the biggie was usb and ram. every stick worked fine, but it didn't like having 3 in at the same time. and if the usb card was in, i'd sleep about 3 minutes before it finished the install. sometimes the slept machine would install okay, other times not. and one of those times, it hosed one of my hard drives, which now cannot be used at all... but i think that had more to do with drive abuse more than the installer.

long post to say, take out everything that wasn't stock and put in one stick of ram...

matt
 
I have just spend the last weekend installing jaguar server on my old Beige G3 (300mgz).
The problem I had was that if I zap't the RAM or started up from a CD I could not get the server OS to boot again, tried everything including resetting the power management, installed on the first 8 gigs partition etc. but no luck, only reinstalling the OS would boot the machine onto the Hard-drive.

After 3 or 4 installs It downed on me to format the disk with OS 9 drivers (as I was not planing on running OS 9 I did not install the drivers).
this has solved my problem and the Mac boots into the HD every time now.

Hope that helps some,
good luck
 
Try Xpostfacto

Try a free utility called Xpostfacto. I had trouble installing 10.2 on my G4 upgraded Beige G3, and this helped clear up the problems. It's been a while since I installed, but I seem to remember that I couldn't install from the factory original Apple DVD drive; I instead ended up installing from an external SCSI CD-Rom (interestingly, a much older drive) without needing to remove expansion cards, CPU, or added memory. The latest version of Xpostfacto claims to allow 10.3 to run on the Beige G3s, although I have not tried it. Here's a link: http://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/Framework.cfm?page=XPostFacto3.html

Good luck!
 
davester1026 said:
Try a free utility called Xpostfacto. I had trouble installing 10.2 on my G4 upgraded Beige G3, and this helped clear up the problems. It's been a while since I installed, but I seem to remember that I couldn't install from the factory original Apple DVD drive; I instead ended up installing from an external SCSI CD-Rom (interestingly, a much older drive) without needing to remove expansion cards, CPU, or added memory. The latest version of Xpostfacto claims to allow 10.3 to run on the Beige G3s, although I have not tried it. Here's a link: http://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/Framework.cfm?page=XPostFacto3.html

Good luck!
Click to expand...

not to put down what you said at all, but xpf is generally not to be used unless there is *no* other way to install...

also, check out the beige forums at apple... info.discussions.apple.com or some jazz like that... very informative...
 
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