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Nermal

Moderator
Original poster
Staff member
Dec 7, 2002
21,433
5,315
New Zealand
I have a beige G3 and I'm trying to install Panther using XPostFacto. I can start the install from within XPF, and after a few seconds the system reboots. However, it doesn't get much further! Usually, when booting into OS 9, I get the "happy Mac" after a few seconds. When trying to boot OS X, on the other hand, I get a completely blank screen for around 15 seconds, followed by the message "no bootable HFS partition". About a minute later I get a grey screen with a mouse, but nothing else.

If I reboot without the OS X CD in the drive, I get the same problem (15 second delay etc) but with a different message ("cannot OPEN", I think it was). I can reboot from the OS 9 CD and set the Startup Disk back to the hard drive, which fixes the problem and lets me boot back into OS 9 again.

After doing some fiddling around, I discovered that the problem occurs when I try to boot from the OS X CD, regardless of whether I use XPostFacto or not. Does XPF usually get invoked later on in the process?

Has anyone experienced this kind of thing before? Any ideas? Thanks :)
 
I've installed Linux in the meantime (YDL 3.0.1) and it works OK, as does OS 9. I've run MacTest Pro and it doesn't find anything wrong, so I think the hardware's all OK.

Jaguar is the latest supported version of Mac OS for beige G3s, but I no longer have a copy, and all the copies I've found online have been too expensive :( Regardless, Panther "should" work via XPostFacto.

Edit: I figured it out! :)
The previous owner of the computer had connected the CD drive to secondary master, and the hard drive to secondary slave. OS 9 and Linux are happy with this, but apparently it's a no-no in OS X. I've swapped them around (HD as master, CD as slave) and now I get a familiar grey Apple logo when I put the Panther CD in :) (it's followed by a kernel panic, but I'm not running via XPostFacto yet, which is probably the reason).

Edit 2: Yep, XPostFacto fixed it, and I'm posting this message from my G3 with OS 10.3.5 :) Next steps are more RAM and a colour screen :p
 
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