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Beige G3MT won't install 10.2 (again)

Submitted by Mark M. Hart on February 20, 2006 - 1:14am. PowerPC Macs

I have a beige g3 minitower with 333mhz G3, 384 meg of ram, an LG tray CDrom drive, and two IDE drives (one is 250 mb, only gets 128 mb in the mac; the other is a 128 mb drive),
OS 9.2.2, ROM revision $77D.45F2.

I got the machine for free and I installed through 9.2.2. I bought 10.2 on eBay and got it installed successfully (partitions: 1st is 5GB for OSX, 2nd is 2 GB for 9.2.2, 3rd is about 115 GB, and the second drive is one 128M partition). OS 9.2.2 is installed in both the 1st and 2nd partitions. I bought 10.4 on eBay and used XPOSTFACTO 4 and a LG DVD RRW to try and install the 10.4, but crashed the machine in the process.

Recovered up to 9.2.2, but now cannot install 10.2. When I try to install 10.2, I press the button to Restart and restart button goes dim but nothing else happens (at this point, I can close the window and try again to install 10.2 but with identical results). If I set the boot device to the CD and reboot I get a black screen. I have to clear the PRAM several times to get it to come back up in 9.2.2.

Can anyone help me with this? I would appreciate any help at all.

Mark M. Hart

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Have you tried holding the c

Submitted by Albookx on February 20, 2006 - 1:24am.

Have you tried holding the c key at start up? Without setting the cd as the start-up disk, reboot and right when you hear the start up chime try holding c. It should force it to boot.

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Holding down 'c' key

Submitted by Mark M. Hart on February 20, 2006 - 1:46am.

Yes, I've tried that also. Sometimes it leads me into a black screen, and sometimes it just seems to ignore the 'c' keypress and boots into 9.2.2.

Thanks!

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Do you have an origional Appl

Submitted by Albookx on February 20, 2006 - 1:50am.

Do you have an origional Apple CD-ROM drive? It may be because it is a thrid party drive that you have and sometime the beige's don't like third party hardware. Any CD-ROM drive with an Apple logo on it should work.

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Original Apple Drive

Submitted by Mark M. Hart on February 20, 2006 - 1:58am.

You may be on to something there. The LG drive was in the mac when I received it; I assumed it was the correct drive for the mac. Maybe I should start looking out for an apple drive (I also read on the web that Sony drives work, too).

Thanks for the tip!

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Original Apple Drive

Submitted by Mark M. Hart on February 20, 2006 - 2:38am.

I just bought an Apple cdrom drive on eBay for 13 bucks including shipping, so I'll know in a few days if this was the problem.

Again, thanks for giving me the tip!

Mark M. Hart

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gobabushka's picture

One more thing...

Submitted by gobabushka on February 20, 2006 - 2:56am.

I had a problem with installing an os on my beige g3. You need to check and see if the drive is set to master, or it won't work.

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One more thing...

Submitted by Mark M. Hart on February 20, 2006 - 3:40am.

Thanks for responding. Yes, the drive is set to master.

Mark M. Hart

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I'm fighting my Beige at the

Submitted by Peter Frederick on March 19, 2006 - 3:24am.

I'm fighting my Beige at the moment (but I think I'm gonna get rid of it) -- lots of problems.

One thing you may have to do is remove all but 128M of memory, reset the MB, and you will also have to reset the open firmware. If the CD is wrong, you may get away with just replacing it, but othewise I'd reset the open firmware first

Hold down the option and command (apple), o, and p keys on startup. Must be a cold start and you must have the keys down before the startup chime, may take a couple tries.

Once you are in the open firmware screen (text only), type init-nvram, then set-defaults, then reset-all. Press return after each entry. you will get an "ok" for the first two. If you get "unknowm command" or something like that on the "init-nvram" try "reset-nvram). Reset-all will cause a reboot.

You must include the dash in the commands.

This cures some strange behavior on boot.

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davintosh's picture

I had mixed results...

Submitted by davintosh on March 19, 2006 - 3:53am.

... with OS X on Beige boxes. I had 10.2.8 running beautifully on two 266MHz machines, but had a devil of a time installing it on a bone-stock 333MHz unit. Had all the problems described on this thread and more with that one. Finally gave up, left 9.2.1 on it, and gave it to my brother to replace an old 6500 (with System 7.5!)

I guess it comes down to figuring out what your time is worth and if you need to run OS X whether you're better off ditching the problem child and replacing it with something that runs OS X more readily than a beige.

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