Rebuilding a B/W G3 tower...

[munckee]

I just picked up a blue and white G3 tower this afternoon that someone was giving away. I'd like to build it up to usable shape, but it came without a hard drive. I happen to have a 40gig drive laying around that I can use.

A couple of problems I've run into:

-my hard drive doesn't have an OS installed. I put the drive in along with a tiger dvd, but that didn't work. I realized that the computer probably only reads CD's (I can dig up my panther cd's if I need to)

-It only came with about 200mb of ram. This won't be enough in the long run, but will tiger even run with that little to get me started?

I have an external HD enclosure that I can put the drive into. Is it possible to use my powerbook and the external enclosure to get the OS installed on the drive, then move it over to the tower with the OS ready to go?

Thanks for the help guys!

 

[Spanky Deluxe]

Put the hard drive in the external enclosuer and the tiger dvd in your 'book, then boot your book from the tiger dvd and install to the external hd, then pop it into the G3 and all should be fine! It'll run with 200MB but it might be a tad slow at times.

Alternatively you can call up Apple and have your Tiger DVD replaced with a set of four CDs I believe.

 

[munckee]

Put the hard drive in the external enclosuer and the tiger dvd in your 'book, then boot your book from the tiger dvd and install to the external hd, then pop it into the G3 and all should be fine! It'll run with 200MB but it might be a tad slow at times.

Alternatively you can call up Apple and have your Tiger DVD replaced with a set of four CDs I believe.

Thanks! Its no problem to put it in the enclosure and do it that way. I've never done it before on an external drive though; will it ask which drive I want to install to at some point? I don't want to accidentally erase my powerbook.

 

[jhu]

Thanks! Its no problem to put it in the enclosure and do it that way. I've never done it before on an external drive though; will it ask which drive I want to install to at some point? I don't want to accidentally erase my powerbook.

yes

 

[Spanky Deluxe]

Thanks! Its no problem to put it in the enclosure and do it that way. I've never done it before on an external drive though; will it ask which drive I want to install to at some point? I don't want to accidentally erase my powerbook.

Yeah it will, just like any normal installation program.

 

[munckee]

Ok, next question. I put the drive in the enclosure and plugged it in, etc, but my powerbook won't even recognize that its there because it was a windows drive last. I'm happy to reformat it for the mac, but how do I get the computer to even see that its there so I can format it?

 

[Spanky Deluxe]

Ok, next question. I put the drive in the enclosure and plugged it in, etc, but my powerbook won't even recognize that its there because it was a windows drive last. I'm happy to reformat it for the mac, but how do I get the computer to even see that its there so I can format it?

It should appear in the drive manager utility, in fact it should even pop up on your desktop because OS X can read windows disks. Check your system profiler's list of connected usb and firewire devices to see if its actually being detected properly.

 

[munckee]

It should appear in the drive manager utility, in fact it should even pop up on your desktop because OS X can read windows disks. Check your system profiler's list of connected usb and firewire devices to see if its actually being detected properly.

Doesn't come up on the desktop. Doesn't come up in the system profiler, I don't think. It would be under "usb bus" not "usb high-speed bus" right?

Thanks for the help!

 

[munckee]

Ok, I fixed the problem with the external not showing up, but I still can't seem to get an OS on the new (old) computer.

I've tried:
-putting the tiger DVD in the drive and restarting
-putting the panther CD in the drive and restarting
-I've tried to install tiger to the HD while its in the USB enclosure from my powerbook, but it says I can't install to the drive
-I've tried to restore the drive with the tiger disk through the disk utility
-I've tried to install tiger with the drive in the tower using my powerbook in target disc mode

Anyone else have any ideas? I'm fresh out.

 

[Dane D.]

Can you tell us more about the specs on computer ie. what cpu?, what Rev. motherboard, optical drive? I own a Rev A. that came with only a 6GB HD, one of the first things I did was update the firmware. I seem to recall reading in a thread somewhere about installing OS X and needing to update the firmware. I installed OS 10.2 and its updates with no problems. Do you have access to another computer to try this option. On another computer install the HD, re-format, do a install and take it back out. Then place it in the B/W and boot. As you can see from my sig. I have a PCI SCSI card which has a bootable HD and non-bootable on it. That can work also. I still use OS 9, which is on the original HD, OS X is on the SCSI HD. By the way, that B/W is a fine computer, my has been running for 6 yrs without ANY breakdowns or hardware failures.

 

[munckee]

Well, I've been working on this all morning. I think that my problem is that I have DVD's for installing and only a CD drive in the B/W. I've tried everything else I can think of, but so far no dice. Unfortunately, my external drive is USB, so Tiger won't install on it because it knows that this isn't a boot drive (when installed in the usb enclosure). I'm trying to restore the hard drive with my panther discs right now via my powerbook, then shift the drive over to the tower.

If that fails, I think my roommate has a spare dvd drive that I can use to get the OS running (but he won't be home until later). On that note, can I use the extra IDE slot on my hard drive ribbon in the B/W to run the dvd drive?

 

[munckee]

That almost worked. I turned on the B/W and got the install screen, but then I got an error that says, "bundled software cannot be installed on this computer".

Anyone know what that means (other than the obvious of it won't install)?

 

[apunkrockmonk]

Did you update the firmware as previously recommended?

 

[munckee]

Did you update the firmware as previously recommended?

Don't honestly know where/how to do that. It's running on panther now; found a different set of discs buried in my stuff that worked.

Now I just need to decide if its worth putting the money into it to make it run the way I want it to. I still need ram, wireless card, and an ide hard drive controller. If I can get them cheap, I'm game to play. But I don't really want to dump a lot of money into this machine.