PowerMac G3 Blue and White no monitor signal

[Caliban2005]

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.

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.

 

[eyoungren]

Pull the SCSI card and SCSI drive and try using an IDE drive to install OS9 to?

 

[Caliban2005]

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.

 

[Caliban2005]

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...

 

[weckart]

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.

 

[z970]

Alternatively, you can also boot into Open Firmware with Cmd + Opt + O + F at the chime and use the multi-boot utility.

 

[Caliban2005]

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:

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 ... 😳

 

[z970]

@Caliban2005 Welcome to the club...

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