Help with B&W G3

[AmbitiousLemon]

We have a Blue and White G3 that seems to function perfectly with Mac OS 8.5 loaded, but when installing Mac OS 9.2.1 from a G4 PowerMac install disk the G3 starts having trouble finding the Startup disk. Sometimes the Installer crashes turning the install off 9.2 as well. If you can install and startup from the disk then it often crashes even after just opening the hard drive icon.

We tried wiping (zeroing all data) the drive multiple times in addition to swapping in other ram.

the crashes seem to mimic a hardware problem but the odd thing is everything behaves properly when OS 8.5 is installed. Its like the poor thing is allergic to 9!

Anyone know what might be going on with this poor old thing.

 

[Choppaface]

1) the restore disks that come with computers are special for that computer. for example, if I used my dual 500's restore disk on my B&W 400 G3 I could expect to see some problems. If you're using the 9.x install disk and not the restore disk, then I'm not sure why you would have problems.

2) for the startup disk problem, reset the pram. I used to have a terrible problem with that and resetting the pram got rid of it

 

[AmbitiousLemon]

we are using install disks not restore disks. and we already tried resetting the pram.


and for anyone interested, no we are not pirating os9 the university owns site liciences to all the operating systems, we just grabbed the first available install disk and used it.

computers is chugging away happily in 8.6 but id really like to get it up to 9.

 

[AlphaTech]

Did you update the firmware of the G3 before installing OS 9.x??

Apple sometimes makes the cd's that ship with systems more specific to those then anything else. While it might work on many systems, it might not on others.

Try installing just the OS (custom install with nothing extra like speech). Once you have that working, then do another custom install to add the rest that you want/need to from the cd.

 

[AmbitiousLemon]

thanks alpha.

i havent updated the firmware.

when we were installing 9 we tried just the base system to no sucess.

also we have used teh same disk to install 9 on another identical g3 with no issues.