Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Sorta stumped with non-booting imac g3

christarp

christarp

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 29, 2013
479
772
Hey guys, need a bit of help here. I was messing around in system preferences on my imac g3 slot load, and in the startup disk i saw mac os 9 so I thought hmm that would be cool if I could just boot directly to it, so I chose to restart it in the OS selected.

Well it didn't work. No real surprise. The real problem is I can't get it to actually boot back into osx 10.4 like it would before. Every time I restart it it simply goes to a floppy disk with a flashing "?" Now, I've tried resetting NVRAM with the command option P R and that didn't help. I've also pressed the button on the back of the imac inside of it, which also didn't help.

Then I decided to hold option to bring me to the startup picker or whatever, and there it finds my hard drive, and it finds a mac OS installation, but selecting it to boot from there also results in the same floppy disk with the blinking "?" I can't think of anything else to do, anyone got any ideas?
 
ctmpkmlec4 said:
Try holding "X" as you boot up the iMac. This should force it to boot OS X System if it exists.
Click to expand...

Nope, still getting that flashing ? with the floppy disk. I don't know why it wouldn't find the files. I was using it just before I tried to boot to mac os 9 in the startup disk in the preference pane of osx 10.4, then I get this. I didn't format the thing, and I can hear the hard drive reading bits at the very beginning so it couldn't have just died.
 
Altemose said:
I have had weirder hard drive failures. Can you try doing an Archive & Install of Tiger?
Click to expand...

Biggest problem with reinstalling is the disks for this system are looong gone. Bought it from an older lady a while ago and she didn't have them.
 
The HDD in one of my iMac G3 Tray Loaders appears to have died as well. Totally unexpected :(

On the bright side, since I didn't put all the screws back in when I had it out for an OS install it'll be easier to put in a new one :)
 
Techtool, Diskwarrior, Drive 10 or Target disk mode are your best bets to see if disk corruption or hardware failure is the problem.
 
Get a Tiger dvd and boot off it. After you have chosen your language choose Tools -> Startup Disk.
Now select your 10.4 install and reboot the system. It should be working fine

If your Mac has no dvd drive or the drive does not accept copied ones, get the cd version of OS X 10.4, boot it from the first disk and follow the same steps shown above.

The reason you can't boot into OS 9 is because your hdd has no OS 9 drivers installed.
Therefore the OS 9 install can't read the disk, resulting in that floppy disk screen being shown to you.
The only official way to get these drivers is to format the drive and select the option to include the drivers before confirming the formatting, using Disk Utility.
 
headsh0t95 said:
Get a Tiger dvd and boot off it. After you have chosen your language choose Tools -> Startup Disk.
Now select your 10.4 install and reboot the system. It should be working fine

If your Mac has no dvd drive or the drive does not accept copied ones, get the cd version of OS X 10.4, boot it from the first disk and follow the same steps shown above.

The reason you can't boot into OS 9 is because your hdd has no OS 9 drivers installed.
Therefore the OS 9 install can't read the disk, resulting in that floppy disk screen being shown to you.
The only official way to get these drivers is to format the drive and select the option to include the drivers before confirming the formatting, using Disk Utility.
Click to expand...

Yep this is exactly what I did. Thanks guys! Everything is working fine now
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back