Powermac G3 Beige Desktop Not Booting from CD (OSX 10.2)

[fingaz]

Hello ladies and chaps,
I'm having some trouble booting my Powermac G3 beige desktop into OSX 10.2 - i know that it's officially supported, but its failing to boot the CD.

Symptoms:
Boot the mac up, press C, grey screen displays, (very) briefly displays a black screen with some white text and resets itself - Chimes, then sits doing nothing, no output to the monitor or anything.
After this, i have to do the Ctrl+Opt+P+R before it will boot back up and repeat.
I have managed to get into the installer before, but install failed presumably due to the old hard drive being knackered (The original Quantum Fireball 4GB drive!!) No such joy since then really...

Tried:
- Replacing the hard disk
- Replacing the battery (the old one only had 0.04V on an open circuit!! New one is all good @ 3.67V open-circuit)
- Replacing the CDROM drive
- Running the Harddrive and CDROM off a seperate powersupply to take some load off the main Mac PSU.

There's currently no OS installed now, as the OSX installer managed to bork the install previously- i think i have an OS9 disk around somewhere, but it'll take some finding (if its even in usable condition! lol)
I'm comtemplating digging out OS9 again and using it with XpostFacto - is that likely to work?

I think that covers it... Any ideas?? lol

Thanks in advance,
FingAZ.

 

[Detrius]

The black screen with white text is likely a kernel panic. Even though it's brief, can you take a picture of what it says? This is likely the key.

 

[fingaz]

Hi, thanks for the quick reply:
To be perfectly honest, the screen flicks so quickly that you don't always see any text, and if you do, i can't guarentee that it is in the slightest bit legible (if its even text at all!)

I do agree with you, it would seem to be a kernel panic of some sort, but physically no means of getting a shot of it without a 100fps fast-motion cam or something equally as rediculous!

I do however now having it installing Mac OSX - found my 9.2 disk, reinstalled, installed XPostFacto, and booted disc that way, using new CD Drive and HDD. So far so good!

A slight side question, during all my boot attempts, it was suggested to zap the PRAM and all that Jazz, which i did- however one suggestion of typing "reset-nvram" into Openfirmware returns an error, suggesting it doesn't understand the command... Whats the correct command if this isn't it??

Thanks again!
FingAZ

 

[CubeHacker]

Some of those old G3's needed a firmware update in order to boot OSX correctly. Can you boot holding down the option key? That should let you access the boot menu to select where to boot from. That will at least tell you that its operating correctly.

If you can get that far, then you may need to install OS9 first in order to update the firmware, so that you can install OS X.