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OS 8.5 anyone?

X

xand83

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 15, 2004
6
0
Hey guys,

I upgraded a friend of mine's rev. B imac g3 a few weeks ago and made a little mistake. I installed Panther on there thinking that the firmware had been upgraded but it hadn't. Luckily, the thing hasn't kicked the bucket but I know it's probably only a matter of time before it starts going haywire.

I need to restore the system back to OS 8.5 and get the firmware, but she doesn't have those original restore disks. I don't know anyone that would have those disks and I'm trying to do the best I can to reduce how much this is costing b/c it is a pretty old mac. Do any of you guys have these disks laying around somewhere? I have no intention of keeping 8.5 on the system as i'd wipe the drive and instal Panther again, but I really need to get that firmware updated. I would be so grateful if someone could let me borrow those cds for a day. I'd pay shipping and some renting fee of your choice if you like and send them back promptly!!

It runs Panther pretty well now and I'd hate to see it die b/c of something I forgot to do! Here are the specs for her imac rev.B (233mhz,128mb,4gb,CD). Thanks for reading this and let me know if you could help in any way. Thanks!
 
kingjr3 said:
Im surprised your running Panther on a machine with 128MB and a 4GB hard drive.

Here's 8...hurry!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=11231&item=5727875720&rd=1&ssPageName=WDVW
Click to expand...

that disk won't boot an iMac. They won't boot with anything less than what they came with, and the first iMac came with OS 8.1.

I'm not positive about this, but I'm pretty sure OS X won't even isntall on a tray loader unless firmwarre update 1.2 was installed. if the thing had OS 9 on it previously, it was up to date. The real problem was with the slot loading iMacs, which needed firmware update 4.1.9 or the video would stop working if OS X was installed.
 
Even if you could get Panther or any other flavour of OS X to install on an rev B iMac (Some people say you can with a LOT of work) it would be v e r y s l o w.

I've got 9.22 on my rev a and it runs well.

OSX needs 16MB VRAM anyway.
 
combatcolin said:
Even if you could get Panther or any other flavour of OS X to install on an rev B iMac (Some people say you can with a LOT of work) it would be v e r y s l o w.

I've got 9.22 on my rev a and it runs well.

OSX needs 16MB VRAM anyway.
Click to expand...

You have to be kidding me. G3 iMacs run Panther fine and OS X doesn't require 16Mb or VRAM. Nice try though.
 
uhm...

As I understand it, this imac came with OS 8.5 and the Apple support imac 233mhz spec page says that's possible. It never ran OS 9.0 and I've gathered from an older post that it's a fluke I could get OS X to load, but it did.

Panther happens to run just fine on this machine. No, it's no speed demon. She only uses it for the internet though, so it's no big deal. I've been told that Panther will begin to act strange soon and it already restarts straight to the firmware screen where I then have to type mac-boot (or boot-mac?).
 
kingjr3 said:
Here's a better deal! This one should work :eek:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=11231&item=5728294221&rd=1
Click to expand...

here's the problem with that one, its not for an imac. OEM system CD's are often machine specific, meaning it may cause problems or just not work. the best thing to do is contact a local MUG to see if anyone can help you out, ask apple if they have any laying around they can send you, buy a retail version of 8.5 (which will work on all machines), or find the OEM disks for that specific model of iMac.

and to the guy who said OS X won't work on those machiens is just wrong. It works finel. a bit pokey perhaps, but all iMacs are listed as supported by apple. There's no work involved, you pop in the Cd and isntall. That's it.
 
kingjr3 said:
Do you know that from the p/n? The auction stated imac, and since it was 8.5, I figured it was for Rev A/B imacs.
Click to expand...


Oops, my bad on that one. I saw some things in the descriptions that said "power macintosh" and I was reading it as powermac, and figured it was for the power macs fo the time, not the iMac. It is an iMac bundle, and should work. Apologies.
 
Firstly I recommend you upgrade to OS 8.6 ;-)

I have 2 Power Mac 7600s running OS 8.6 and they hardly ever crash.

I suggest you go to VersionTracker and DL Carracho. Once on the Carracho peer to peer network you can search for servers with older software on them.

I remember there was one that had old systems etc.
 
combatcolin said:
Oh, on the Apple site it states that you need a 16Mb VRAM graphic card.
Click to expand...

Thats for Quartz Extreme (Quartz compositing interface layer + graphical processing unit acceleration through OpenGL). If you don't have a GPU that supports Quartz Extreme you fall back on just Quartz which is the same compositing interface but has no acceleration so some cool effects are disabled like fading desktop images, and the cube during fast user switching.

EDIT: Someone beat me to it.
 
A-Ha!
I have learned the error of my ways Master Yoda.

Cool, might try and install Panther (eMac discs) and have a fiddle, 96MB ram and 6mb VRAM so not too slow.

Not quite sure if the emac panther install discs will work as i think they might be machine specific.
 
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