beige g3 os x install blackout

The beige G3 isn't officially supported for OS X. Memory configuration, additional drives, etc. can have an affect on whether it will install properly or not.

The usual recommendation is to remove all non-essential drives and cards, then put them back one at a time if you get OS X installed.

You might want to read the documentation for Xpostfacto, and use it in your installation attempt.

The beige G3 and Wall Street G3 PowerBooks are officially supported up to 10.2.8. 10.3 and 10.4, however are not officially supported on these machines. Beige G3's are notoriously dodgy with OS X, however. The beige G3's (and Wall Street PB G3, tray load iMac) can only boot off of a partition no larger than 8gb in OS X when using an ATA disk (does NOT apply when using SCSI). You can have a single 40gb partition and OS 9 will work fine on it, but 10 won't. Don't ask me why, but it's one of the little weird things about the machine. Try booting into verbose mode while you're booting from the OS X install disc. This is done by doing the hold down C until you hear the CD grinding and can see the machine booting from the cd, then immediately hold down the apple key and V. It'll go to text, and you'll see every little thing it does. This should help.

- iantm

Woah, get your facts right dude. The beige G3 is OFFICALLY supported by Apple up to 10.2.8.

Alright...before anyone gets their suspenders in a knot, let me put it this way:

Apple says the beige G3 is supported up to 10.2.8.

In reality, no, it's not. Installing OS X - any version - on a beige G3 is hit-and-miss, and Apple has never made any update to remedy that process. The Wings AV card has never been usable under OS X.

There's as much OS X support for the beige G3 from Apple as there is for the 9600. You can install it, probably, and may need a third-party program to do it. That's your support.

Thanks guys for your responses. I don't understand however, implementing xpostfacto on the machine when it's not installed or can't see it unless it is installed (maybe I'm missing something). I'd already removed the cards that allow firewire and usb peripherals. The only things left are the internal zip drive and the factory built-in video card for the A/V Apple monitor. There's nothing else connected.

Here is what I know about beige g3s and OSX.

OSX 10.2.8 can make the screen black if you use the inbuilt video.

Apple has a fix that involves taking files out of AppleNDRV folder in the system library extension folder.

OSX 10.3 can be a nightmare for some beige g3s.

My inbuilt video with panther just blacked out when it felt like it.

I eventually got a fix for it but it is not that easy.

I compiled the opendarwin IONDRVSupport kext and used it instead of the Apple IONDRVSupport kext but it only seems to work with xpostfacto 3 (with beige builtin video support) and not xpostfacto 4.

I suspect there is some sort of strange interaction going on at boot time between xpostfactos boot image and the IONDRVSupport kext (which loads the inbuilt videos NDRVs).

Also if your install partition is greater than 8GB the heathrow chip gets invalid addresses for disk access and goes a bit nuts causing the inbuilt video to black out and can also cause disk corruption.

If anyone wants the opendarwin IONDRVSupport kext I'll email it to them.

use XPostFacto and use it to install off of the CD. When booting, you need to make sure the date and time are correct. That screwed my install up a bit. I have 10.3 on my system. The system blacked out when until I had 10.3.9 on it. Also, you will have to do the updates 1 by 1, as it WILL black out if it is not done that way. It might also kernel panic. On my AIO, when getting into OS X after everyboot, I have to set the brightness up, and have no configs for picture width, heigth (heighth??) so, I can really only do it with 1024x769. one thing to do, is to put as little ram in it as possibel (above 128, below 320 if you can help it...) also, OS X is REALLY picky with RAM, so it might take some time to get the right combination. Remove as much VRAM as you can. It seems that the Modules are not really supported by OS X (it has to do with the pickiness of ram os x has) I had to try 2 different VRAM Modules in mine before I got it to work.

Also, the built-in video isn't fast, so use ShadowKiller from Unsanity to kill the shadows of the windows. That really helps the system from getting bogged down. And finally, DITCH 10.2!!!! 10.3 is much faster and is worth the $ put into the G3 with .3M also, 10.2 hasn't really touched the issue of the G3 like .3 did with 3.9. I used .2 on my machine and it ran slow as mollasses. so, it was worse than having OS 9 on it (which was also slow) 10.3 runs like a charm