Upgrading a 233 MHz iMac Tray Loading /B

[donaldl43]

You should have said where you were earlier... and yes i think I've dealt with the USED MAC guy when he was in Hollywood... is he a Brit? Always fair with me.

I'd still do a 10.3 on the imac, ask him. I ran OS9 through 2003 on my then new Titanium Powerbook and let me refresh my own memory here... it crashed. It froze. OSX is way more stable than OS9 it is a new universe and you will have no trouble running it on the 266.

He's Middle Eastern I think. Maybe Pakistan or something like that. Very nice guy and was extremely fair with me.

I have the machine at home now with a few issues. He did not get OS X installed but he did get 9.2.2 and firmware 1.2 on it. He also partitioned the drive to the full 128 GB and that might be the root of the problem I'm having now. I am trying to boot on the 10.2 CD he lent me so I can repartition the drive and install it. It's just sitting at the apple screen and not going any further. I suspect it's either because the drive is already partitioned too large or something else that I know nothing about is happening.

Are you in the LA area? I live near Sherman Way/Winnetka in the Valley.

 

[MacTech68]

The 10.2 CD should boot all the way to the installer but the internal disk will show as greyed-out if the partition is larger than 8GB. So it sounds like the CD drive is having trouble reading. Note that it can take an eternity to boot OSX from a CD.

Try this. If you have a blank USB thumb drive, boot from the installed 9.2.2. Then, click on the icon of the thumb drive once. Next, select "Erase Disk" from the "Special" menu and select "MacOS Extended" as the format.

Copy the "Applications (MacOS 9)", "Documents" and "System Folder" folders to the thumb drive. It will take a while. Note that to remove the thumb drive you drag it to the trash can. You must do this or you will corrupt the thumb drive. Alternatively, select "Shut Down" from the "Special Menu" and remove the thumb drive after the iMac turns off.

You might want to try the CD-ROM drive firmware update I linked to earlier, and/or clean the lens on the CD drive with either forced air, a soft brush or camera lens cleaner kit. These tray loading CD drives were very un-forgiving with CD-Rs.

Once you're able to boot your CD, you'll need to go the the "Utilities" menu and select "Disk Utility" and select the Drive (the device, not the volume) and then select the "Partition" tab to setup an HFS+ volume no larger than 8GB as the first partition and HFS+ for the remainder. Make sure the option to "Install MacOS 9 Drivers" is ticked.

Once you've installed 10.2, you can copy the three folders back from the thumb drive and still have the dual boot functionality of 9.2.2.
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[donaldl43]

It seems as though the CDs for 10.2 were corrupt. I couldn't copy them or read them in my Windows machine. I took those back and got a copy of 10.3 but I didn't notice it was an "Upgrade version". I also got a copy of 9.2.2 while I was there which is good.

I was actually able to boot from the 10.3 upgrade CD but then of course it told me I needed an 8 GB or less partition. I went ahead and repartitioned which of course then wiped out my 9.2.2 install. No problem, I reinstalled that then went to install the 10.3. As you have probably guessed by now it didn't find a copy of OS X installed so it wouldn't go forward.

I went back and got a copy of 10.1 Install from him and that's installing now. I'll report back when it's done.

 

[donaldl43]

I got 10.1 installed fine and now it's working on 10.3. It didn't take very long to install 10.1 but it's been going for close to an hour on the first 10.3 CD. It's almost done I think. It says it's got less than a minute but it's been saying that for a long time.

Edit: Ok, on to the next disk.

 

[MonksMac]

It always takes a long time at the end, especially so with that type of machine.

 

[donaldl43]

Quite a bit later and it's gotten to the point where it says it's Optimizing the System. I take it that's a good sign.

 

[DoFoT9]

Quite a bit later and it's gotten to the point where it says it's Optimizing the System. I take it that's a good sign.

sounds like a very good sign, just let it be haha.

 

[donaldl43]

Success! I now have 10.3.9 and I'm updating Safari and a few other things. Now I have another question.

I put in a 160 GB drive of which the machine can see 128 of which 8 is dedicated to the OS X install. This means I've got a partition that's about 120 GB sitting there. When I install software does it default to the OS X(small) partition or will it ask me where to put it? I know with a PC it asks but since I'm not terribly familiar with the Mac I want to make sure I don't fill the 8 GB partition if it's easy to just point to the big one.

Before that though I want to thank everyone who offered suggestions, help, and just plain moral support. You've helped a Mac newbie take a $5 piece of almost useless hardware and turn it in to something that I can actually use quite a lot. I'm sure it helped that I'm already a PC geek but there's a lot to learn and I'm just getting started.

 

[spue2001]

nice work

 

[donaldl43]

Here's a couple of shots of it booting up.

 

[spue2001]

nice

 

[donaldl43]

Yay! I'm posting this with the Mac using Firefox 2. I also moved it inside the house so I can actually use it without having to go out to the garage.

I asked a question in my previous post. Does anyone have an answer? Thanks in advance if you do.

 

[MonksMac]

Yay! I'm posting this with the Mac using Firefox 2. I also moved it inside the house so I can actually use it without having to go out to the garage.

I asked a question in my previous post. Does anyone have an answer? Thanks in advance if you do.

It depends on the Application. Most Mac applications are just dragged and dropped from a .dmg (disk image) to wherever you want to put it. Others like iTunes or major software from Apple like iPhoto etc. use the Mac OS X installer and usually lets you pick where you want to install. I hope I was clear enough...