Jaguar on a Beige G3

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davintosh's picture
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Jaguar on a Beige G3

I need some help. I've got a 333MHz beige G3 tower that I would like to get Jaguar running on, but I'm having a heck of a time. The machine is pretty basic -- original processor, original ATA CD-ROM drive, 288MB RAM, 60GB ATA HD, ATI 32MB video card, USB card, internal Zip drive -- but it absolutely refuses to boot up from an OS 10.2 installer disk.

I've tried everything I can think of; pulling out any and all 3rd party hardware, using an external SCSI optical drive, resetting the PRAM, resetting the CUDA switch, reseating the memory, and on and on... but it still won't boot from the installer disk. It will boot up from an OS 9 installer disk with no problem.

If I stick the disk in while in OS 9 it will mount, and when I double-click the installer I get the dialog box telling me to hit restart to begin the installation; that part never has worked, and I usually get an error about not being able to set the startup disk. I usually manually quit that, then reboot holding the C key.

When holding the C key it will read from the CD, reboot again (like it should) then it reads from the CD for a very short time then quits. The monitor comes alive for a second or two after it reads from the CD, but it goes to sleep again right away. And there it sits.

The weird thing is that I did install Jaguar on this particular machine once, but never ran it because I was trying to use an incompatible SCSI card & hard drive (tried to put a LVD SCSI disk on an Apple/ATTO card; the Jaguar installer would recognize it and install to it, but the system couldn't find it to boot from after the install finished.) I've installed Jaguar on several other beige G3's & had no problems whatsoever. This one though has me banging my head on my desk trying to figure out what the trouble is.

Anybody have a suggestion? I'd really like to use OS X on this dude.

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Beige Jag install

I've found that some Beigies just don't want to boot an OS X CD unless you use a DVD-ROM. Maybe it's a faster drive, don't know. But it does seem to make a difference. And no - I'm not using a DVD install disk.

Some Beigies just won't let you do it for some reason. I've never had so much trouble installing an OS as I have with OSX on a beige G3. If you have another Mac you can use to install on the drive then put it in the Beigie.

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Thanks, Krow

I had thought of using a second machine, as I have access to another similar machine that's already running Jaguar, but that involves taking this one out of service for a day or more. My kids would complain bitterly. Maybe after school is out at the end of the month.

I hadn't heard of the DVD-ROM thing before... but the strange thing with that is that I did get it to boot from the 10.2 installer once before. Only the Shadow knows... Wink

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Try letting the machine sit.

Try letting the machine sit. I had this problem with the installer on my machine. It turns out when BootX loads it was in a resolution that my monitor didn't support, after the GUI loaded the monitor poped to life.

P.S Panther would run better on this machine with Ryans Remple's XPostFaco " http://eshop.macsales.com/osxcenter/XPostFacto/ " Seeing that Panther has munch better memorry management.

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Re: Try letting the machine sit.

Try letting the machine sit. I had this problem with the installer on my machine. It turns out when BootX loads it was in a resolution that my monitor didn't support, after the GUI loaded the monitor poped to life.

P.S Panther would run better on this machine with Ryans Remple's XPostFaco " http://eshop.macsales.com/osxcenter/XPostFacto/ " Seeing that Panther has munch better memorry management.

Panther does run better on the beigies.

In fact I had a 266DT that I never could get Jag to run on, even with Xpostfacto. But I did get Panther loaded with Xpostfacto on the 266MHz/320RAM/on-board 2MB VRAM video and it wasn't too bad. It was much better with a 16MB ATI video card thogh as far as screen redrawing.

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Jaguar on a Beige

I had a HELL of a time trying this on my Uncle's Mac (Beige G3 300 tower) It worked fine on my G3 266 DT. Literally 50+ tries, the only way I got it to work was to remove all PCI cards except a Radeon 9200 PCI, and all RAM but the Apple installed 128MB. (even this was tried 20+ times b4 it took) This worked fine until we tried to boot into OS 9.2.2... It booted into 9, but never let us boot into X again, ever... I have had many problems like this, and there seems to be no logic behind why it works, or doesn't... I like to think I kicked it in the right place at the right time - when it does work... No help here, but an affirmation of the troubles you are having - for no good reason.

Cheers.

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lisius_kent, You Rock, Dude!

I followed your advice & tried Panther with XPostFacto, and it worked like a charm.

Strange that it takes a third-party software hack and an unsupported OS to get this machine to OS X. After all is said and done I'm not sure how much I'm going to use it... I just read that serial port printers won't work with it. Anybody wanna buy a nice Laserwriter 4/600?

Maybe it's time to break down and buy a mini!

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My Beige G3 won't even boot from an OS 9 CD...

Like some of the other commenters here, my computer was previously running Jaguar with no problems. Then I decided to upgrade, adding a Sonnet Tempo ATA 133 card and a 40 GB Hitachi hard drive. That's when the trouble started...

When attempting to start up from the Jaguar CD, the computer seems to completely ignore the disk, displaying only the "questionmark floppy" icon. When I attempt to start up from the OS 9 CD, it gets about halfway through the OS 9 startup screen and displays a message about a bus error, and to restart with the shift key down, which does nothing except the exact same thing, ad infinitum...

If I remove the ATA card and replace the new hard drive with the original 4 GB Quantum (with Jaguar only installed) I get the "questionmark floppy" icon, but I can hear the hard disk spinning up, reading, then spinning down, spinning up, reading, shutting down, on and on, ad infinitum...Attempting to start from the CD without the ATA card gives the same result as with the card...

The machine is a Rev. A (1997) PowerMac G3 "minitower," 266 MHz, 384 MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9200 PCI, Apple ADB keyboard and mouse. I would trash this thing in a heartbeat for a new Mac Mini, except that I've sunk a bunch of cash into a G4 700 MHz Sonnet processor upgrade, Radeon 9200 card, 3 x 256 MB RAM sticks, Sonnet ATA 133 card, Pioneer DVD-R drive, Orange Micro USB2/Firewire800 card,and the 40 GB hard drive...I don't want to mess with unloading all of it on eBay, so if I can't get this P.O.C. to work I'll just get a B&W G3 or a "Yikes" box, because I know all of this stuff will work in one of them...

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Try resetting Open Firmware

Try reseting open firmware:
Start up with CMD-OPT-O-F (that's an o as in open)
Then
init-nvram return (some machines require reset-nvram)
set-defaults return
reset-all return

It will restart. It won't hurt doing a PRAM reset, nor pushing the CUDA switch (computer off!!!)
Then use XPostFacto.
Remember the 8GByte limit for IDE drives

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Another long-dead thread rise

Another long-dead thread rises from the grave!

Your desire to help is admirable, but if there's been no post in five months, the original poster has either got an answer or got bored and moved on.

Let sleeping posts lie.

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Re: Another long-dead thread rise

Another long-dead thread rises from the grave!

Your desire to help is admirable, but if there's been no post in five months, the original poster has either got an answer or got bored and moved on.

Let sleeping posts lie.

Indeed, the issue solved itself when I bought my brand spankin' refurbished Mac mini (1.42GHz, 512MB, 80GB, Bluetooth, Airport). My kids are really digging the new games on it!

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missed this long ago, but its possible, I bet

I just read that serial port printers won't work with it.

Don't believe everything you read.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030530110330235

I did this hack with my swII and 8600 w/ Panther, and it works like a charm. I bet it could be adapted to laser printers.

I am so SURPRISED that there is not more on using serial printers with OS X on Applefritter! There are all those sweet Apple lasers out there, and all those machines that XPostFacto turns into relatively stable servers, and there is hardly anything here... so odd.

Someone who has time should take it upon themselves to list the Apple laser printers that use the more standard toner cartrages, like from HP, that can still be found for less than a fortune... and explore this getting the worthless serial port to turn the machine into a print server (which is damn easy in OS X).

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i had problems installing 0s

i had problems installing OS X 10.2 on this beige G3 AIO. it would install the first cd but when it was all done it restart like normal. but once it restarted it showed a white screen with can't open writing acrost the screen and go to the happy mac screen and start restarting itself.

All i had to do was remove the jummper on the hdd to put it into the single master drive setting it was set to master/slave config witch was making the drive 2nd to the cd rom drive but it was on a diffrent ide chain. a guy from another forum told me to check the hdd strap setting i didnt know what he ment at first.

then he asked me brand and model of the hdd. ha came back and posted a link to W.D.'s site showing the jummper settings for diffrent drives and my hdd has a 10 pin's where the jummper goes. so i chose to pull the jummper out to try the single master setting an it worked.

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