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complete Mac newbie,need help with G3 B&W mac, Pleeeaassee !!!!

U

UberPCDork

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 14, 2009
7
0
I've been working on PC's 20+ years,but recently someone gave me a G3 Blue & White Mac, it's my first Mac desktop. It did not come with a hard drive,cables,software, nothing, just the tower. A friend of mine loaned me his backup copy of OS 9 which he has used before.I took a 40GB Western Digital hard drive,formatted it to a Mac Journaled format using a Hackintosh disk. I installed the drive in the G3, jumper setting on Master/no slave, booted the system up,held down "C" on the keyboard to boot off of the cd-rom,then I get a grey screen with a mouse cursor and a picture of a 3.5" floppy disk with a blinking question mark.

So my question is, what am I doing wrong? Is there a bios menu I can boot into to change something? I beleive the system has 192 mb of memory,so I beleive it can run upto 10.3., I can scrap this system and buy a new Mac Mini,but I want to learn about macs by starting with this one. Any help will be GREATLY appreciated. Thank you in advance.
 
OS 9 didn't use HFS+ Journaled. ;)

It has been forever, so I forget what it used, but you might be able to find a copy of Jaguar or Panther (I recommend the latter) on the cheap on eBay if you want to learn before buying a Mac Mini; though a Mac Mini would be a golden opportunity that you wouldn't ever regret. Sure, you'd want more power almost immediately, but that's when you buy an iMac or Mac Pro and use the Mac Mini as an iTunes server. :D
 
You can boot from the OS 9 CD (by holding down the C key).

Then use Disk Utility to reformat the Startup Disk in the non Journaled format.

To be honest though, you probably want OS X on there, as there is far more help out there on using it and it is a far more stable system.
 
ok,i found a copy of OSX 10.3. When I boot this disc,i get the grey apple logo sreen with the spinning pinwheel thing, it stays for about a minute or so,then reboots. Is this a related problem as the OS 9 disc? I did reformat the drive as a Mac OS Extended (not journaled). I can not get either discs to boot to the point of accessing disc utility. Is there a third party boot disc i can download just so i can format the disc to mac os standard format?
 
IIRC, you have to update the firmware on B&W's before OS X will load or boot on them......BUT the updater only runs in OS 9, so you should reformat the HD and install it first.

Then get the updater (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58374), run it and reboot to make sure the machine is running ok.....

Then you can boot from the OS X install disk and proceed.... but beware, 192mb of ram is near the absolute minimum for X, so you may wanna consider gettin some more asap.......

PS: I just happen to have 3x 256mb sticks of PC133 that I can let go for cheap, as well as a GeForce2 32mb video card (which will considerably speed up OS X gui and screen effects) :eek: just pm me if interested.....
 
SmurfBoxMasta said:
IIRC, you have to update the firmware on B&W's before OS X will load or boot on them......BUT the updater only runs in OS 9, so you should reformat the HD and install it first.

Then get the updater (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58374), run it and reboot to make sure the machine is running ok.....

Then you can boot from the OS X install disk and proceed.... but beware, 192mb of ram is near the absolute minimum for X, so you may wanna consider gettin some more asap.......

PS: I just happen to have 3x 256mb sticks of PC133 that I can let go for cheap, as well as a GeForce2 32mb video card (which will considerably speed up OS X gui and screen effects) :eek: just pm me if interested.....
Click to expand...

10.3 will boot with 32MB. I know, I've tried and yes, it was an accident.

It took forever, but it got there. :)
 
SmurfBoxMasta said:
IIRC, you have to update the firmware on B&W's before OS X will load or boot on them......BUT the updater only runs in OS 9, so you should reformat the HD and install it first.

Then get the updater (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58374), run it and reboot to make sure the machine is running ok.....

Then you can boot from the OS X install disk and proceed.... but beware, 192mb of ram is near the absolute minimum for X, so you may wanna consider gettin some more asap.......

PS: I just happen to have 3x 256mb sticks of PC133 that I can let go for cheap, as well as a GeForce2 32mb video card (which will considerably speed up OS X gui and screen effects) :eek: just pm me if interested.....
Click to expand...

sure i'm interested,don't know how to PM you on this board though. Are you able to PM me?
 
Sounds like the os9 disk is bad or the optical drive is bad. FYI, you really can't learn with OS9.

OS9 is extremely old. It does NOT represent the Mac OS of the recent decade.

Harddrive jumper might be wrong? Or on the wrong position on the cable?

Get OSX 10.2, 10.3 or 10.4
 
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