No sound on iMac G3

[Dr. Freeman]

'Sup MacRumors, I bought a slot loading, bondi blue iMac G3 from eBay very cheap. Of course, the seller didn't provide me with the original recovery disks.
After dealing with the faulty CD drive and the appearently damaged hard drive, I finally installed Mac OS 9 using an external USB CD-RW drive, a brand new hard drive and an OS 9 CD I borrowed from a friend who has a PowerMac G4.
Unfortunately, when the Mac started up, I heard no chimes and the sound check application from the control panel does nothing, but it does pick signal from the external mic, so I'm guessing this is not a faulty logic board problem as described in the iMac manual.
I am not very familiar with Macs, but does this means I need to install the CDs that came originally with the iMac or do I need a driver or something? Please help! Thanks in advance.

 

[tayloralmond]

By chance do you know what specific iMac model this is? Also, what specific OS 9 release are you running (9.0, 9.1, 9.2.2, etc.)

 

[Dr. Freeman]

By chance do you know what specific iMac model this is? Also, what specific OS 9 release are you running (9.0, 9.1, 9.2.2, etc.)

Oh yes, sorry for not clearing up that bit.
It's an iMac G3 with 64 MB RAM, slot loading, no Firewire and a 350 Mhz processor. I don't know the exact model but according to what I've read on Wikipedia, it must be from 1999/2000.
It is running Mac OS 9.2.2.

 

[tayloralmond]

Oh yes, sorry for not clearing up that bit.
It's an iMac G3 with 64 MB RAM, slot loading, no Firewire and a 350 Mhz processor. I don't know the exact model but according to what I've read on Wikipedia, it must be from 1999/2000.
It is running Mac OS 9.2.2.

Well because you're running 9.2.2, you shouldn't have any missing drivers because 9.2.2 was released after your iMac was manufactured. I don't have a lot of experience with OS 9 so I can't really help you troubleshoot the software side of it. The only thing I can recommend is trying to install OS X (if you happen to have the disks and some RAM to put into the iMac) and see if your sound reappears. Otherwise, I'm sure someone with more OS 9 experience will be able to help.

 

[Dr. Freeman]

Well because you're running 9.2.2, you shouldn't have any missing drivers because 9.2.2 was released after your iMac was manufactured. I don't have a lot of experience with OS 9 so I can't really help you troubleshoot the software side of it. The only thing I can recommend is trying to install OS X (if you happen to have the disks and some RAM to put into the iMac) and see if your sound reappears. Otherwise, I'm sure someone with more OS 9 experience will be able to help.

I'm going to go ahead and install OS 10.1, it's on one of thr CD's from the PowerMac G4, but first I'm going to update the OpenFirmware. There shouldn't be problems with me using only 64 MB RAM.

 

[Dr. Freeman]

Scratch that, there were problems during the installation.
First, I upgraded my iMac's firmware to the latest, I frowned when I saw I needed to hear a loud noise in order to install the new firmware, but surprisingly, I DID hear the noise and the firmware update worked just like it should.
Does this means the speakers work? Or is that noise coming from another source, perhaps a BIOS-like speaker? (I don't think so).
However, when inserting the OS X Puma CD on the external CD drive and clicking on install, this alert appears: "Startup disk was unable to select the install CD as the startup disk. -2"
So what I did was change the startup volume to the external CD drive and reboot, which did the trick; the OS X CD started booting with a spinning wait cursor and a happy Mac until a broken Mac folder icon appears and the whole system crashes.

All I wanted to have was sound on my iMac and it only opened a whole new plethora of problems.