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Caliban2005

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 22, 2020
11
7
Hi All,

I have picked up a PowerMac G3 this weekend from eBay. It booted into MacOS 9.2 but crashed every time I got to the desktop with no input through mouse or keyboard possible. Booting from a 9.2 CD did let me go into System Profiler to verify all the hardware was present as p[er auction..

So I got to work this morning to clean out what seemed like 20 years worth of grime and dust from the machine.

IMG_3919.jpeg


Was very happy with how well this turned out - however upon completing the re-assembley I run into a problem: The machine would not display any picture on the monitor. :(

After some trial and error I worked out that I could get a picture - but only if I disconnect the IDE bus for the CD-ROM and Zip drive. Individually disconnecting any of the device made no difference - only with the IDE ribbon cable disconnected - would the machine boot into MacOS. Unfortunately I still have the problem that MacOS crashes every time I boot from the (SCSI) hard drive.

Any advise how to get the CD ROM / IDE bus working again?


Many thanks.

101811F7-4359-4F39-9E1F-20275B17CB1E_1_201_a.jpeg
 
Last edited:
Pull the SCSI card and SCSI drive and try using an IDE drive to install OS9 to?
 
Pull the SCSI card and SCSI drive and try using an IDE drive to install OS9 to?
I have tried disconnecting the SCSI drive and that makes no difference. The limiting factor seems to be the IDE cable being connected or not. One possible explanation might be that I damaged the housing of the IDE cable during cleaning and it's causing a short circuit. Unfortunately I don't have another IDE cable at hand to test - need to order one first.
 
OK - last night I did disconnect the SCSI drive and connected an IDE drive I had in storage. Because the drive had been taking from an iMac G4 - it still had an install of Tiger on it and the G3 booted without issue into Tiger. So it was the old IDE cable causing the issue.

However now I have a new problem: The drive also has a MacOS classic folder which showed up as a bootable drive. I made mistake to select this drive as the boot drive - however the machine now get's stuck on a folder icon with the question mark. It must be partly loading OS9.2.2 because I have a mouse pointer - but nothing I can with it.

Can anyone please help how I would change the boot partition back to OS10.4? Strangely enough the G3 doesn't seem to support holding 'Options' for boot select...
 
Can anyone please help how I would change the boot partition back to OS10.4? Strangely enough the G3 doesn't seem to support holding 'Options' for boot select...

Boot from CD by holding down C at the chime. Use the Startup Disk function from Control Panels in the CD to select your next startup volume. The B/W does not have a functioning Boot Selector screen.
 
Alternatively, you can also boot into Open Firmware with Cmd + Opt + O + F at the chime and use the multi-boot utility.
 
Thanks for the tips. I tried to boot into 9.2.2 via CD - however it couldn't find any mounted volumes on the HDD. So I booted into he 10.4 installer and change the boot drive from 'Utilities' in there. This fixed the issue.

Of course I run shortly after into another issue. To solve the issue with the none bootable MacOS9 - I decided to re-partion the HDD with the 'MacOS 9 Driver' option from the 10.4 installer and start again. And for the first time an install of MacOSX failed with an error message:

IMG_3951.jpeg



I tried 3 times to re-boot, however the error persists. Any thoughts?

This 'Blue & White" is giving me a quite a bit of grief ... :oops:
 
@Caliban2005 Welcome to the club...

 
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