I found this Power Mac G3 (B&W) on the street; at first it ran okay, but crashed constantly and seemed to need a reinstall of its OS (jaguar); I got a set of CDs and attempted a clean install.
Long story short, it seems the OS 9 was corrupted or incorrectly uninstalled by the former owner, and my efforts resulted in a broken folder w/ question-mark error screen. It restarts with the tiny left-side restart button, but there is no on screen menu for shut down or restart. Every restart brings up the same error.
I can get the install screen with the Jaguar install disk, but when it gets to the selection of drive, all available drives are excluded with a red exclamation mark, and the installer says it can't install to the drives indicated because "no former version of Mac OS is installed", which is true.
I went through the Disk Utility, repartitioned the drive back from the three partitions it had to one, then erased it, then partitioned it in half (it's a 20 GB total, so each partition is about 9.5 or so)
At this point it seems nothing at all is installed on the drive, and I can't get it to accept Jaguar. I have a Mac Mini disk set with OS 9 on it, but it was on a DVD, so I copied it onto a CD and tried to use it to reinstall the OS 9 but no go - the disk wasn't even recognized.
Last, because there is no menu bar to use to get into a proper shut down command, I can only shut it down by using the main power button - but even that doesn't always work. I've tried to use the recommended key commands to force quit, to force a hard restart, to make it shut down, but it does not respond to any key commands.
When the power button doesn't work, I've had to unplug it to shut it down, which I know is bad.
So what do I do now? Someone told me I could just do a clean install of Tiger onto it, even if it is wiped, and it would take. Will this work, or would I be wasting my money on disks?
Thanks for any input on this. My manuals and handbooks only go back so far, and nobody seems to have the old troubleshooting handbook that came with this little Smurf when it first came out. Sigh. I was hoping to restore this baby and give it to a kid who needs a computer.
Long story short, it seems the OS 9 was corrupted or incorrectly uninstalled by the former owner, and my efforts resulted in a broken folder w/ question-mark error screen. It restarts with the tiny left-side restart button, but there is no on screen menu for shut down or restart. Every restart brings up the same error.
I can get the install screen with the Jaguar install disk, but when it gets to the selection of drive, all available drives are excluded with a red exclamation mark, and the installer says it can't install to the drives indicated because "no former version of Mac OS is installed", which is true.
I went through the Disk Utility, repartitioned the drive back from the three partitions it had to one, then erased it, then partitioned it in half (it's a 20 GB total, so each partition is about 9.5 or so)
At this point it seems nothing at all is installed on the drive, and I can't get it to accept Jaguar. I have a Mac Mini disk set with OS 9 on it, but it was on a DVD, so I copied it onto a CD and tried to use it to reinstall the OS 9 but no go - the disk wasn't even recognized.
Last, because there is no menu bar to use to get into a proper shut down command, I can only shut it down by using the main power button - but even that doesn't always work. I've tried to use the recommended key commands to force quit, to force a hard restart, to make it shut down, but it does not respond to any key commands.
When the power button doesn't work, I've had to unplug it to shut it down, which I know is bad.
So what do I do now? Someone told me I could just do a clean install of Tiger onto it, even if it is wiped, and it would take. Will this work, or would I be wasting my money on disks?
Thanks for any input on this. My manuals and handbooks only go back so far, and nobody seems to have the old troubleshooting handbook that came with this little Smurf when it first came out. Sigh. I was hoping to restore this baby and give it to a kid who needs a computer.
