Need help with upgrdade - Applenewbbie

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Need help with upgrdade - Applenewbbie

Hello all, so yes I just got my first apple, an imac G3 (TRAY LOADING), and I've updated the firmware up to 3 for some reason it just wont take 4.19 which Ive read is the proper one to have before upgrading to os x.

Here's the thing I need to upgrade this guy to OS X pronto, so I need for someone to tell me how to do this step by step in a simple baby-like fashion.

NOTE: this is a tray loading imac g3 with enough ram (288 megs) and a decent processor 233 mhz(well decent to take os x at least). I havent been able to do it and need some help.
How do I got about doing this without screwing up the fimrware update which supposedly needs to be 4.19 for the other imacs (slot loading ones). Should I just try 10.1 or 10.2? (arent those discs dvd's? if so my imac wont read dvd's it has a simple cd-rom drive. Please please please help, any suggestions are appreaciated.

thanks

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hmm...

G3 tray loading iMacs not my specialty... but if I had one... I'd start with Jaguar, and if that worked well... I'd try upgrading to Panther... then I'd try Tiger (might install easier with XPostFacto). i'd see which was the compromise between best performance/most stable... and I stick with that, even if it meant downgrading.

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Rev. A 233mhz iMac G3:

Rev. A 233mhz iMac G3: Rage II video chip upgradeable from 2mb to 6mb VRAM max, 4GB 5400RPM harddrive (hope it's been upgraded), USB 1.1 ports, and a nasty habit of overheating when pushed. Personally, I wouldn't upgrade it beyond Jaguar ( OS 10.2.8 ). What would you do with anything higher considering the machine's limitations? Yep, make sure you do all the firmware upgrades, including the modem firmware and I think there's a CD drive firmware upgrade too. Have fun with your iMac, learn about the Mac environment, save your money, hurry up and get a later mac with more potential, or wait for the Macintels which are a breath away.

Here's your spot to check out:
http://www.lowendmac.com/imacs/imac.shtml

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OS X must be on the first 8 GB partition

The iMac tray-loader is one of those quirky, early G3s that require you to install Mac OS X in a particular fashion: specifically, if your HD is larger than 8 GB, you must partition it first. Mac OS X has to be installed on the first partition of 8 GB or less.

You'll also need to install Mac OS 9.2.2 if you want to be able to use older applications in Classic mode. Plan to do this first. What's cool about this is that you can still boot a CRT iMac to either Mac OS 9 or X -- from the same drive!

If the CD-ROM drive isn't working (a likely possibility), you will either need to replace it or attach the HD to another Mac in order to do the installations. Tray-loaders can't boot from USB, so an external CD-ROM drive will not be an option here. You can use it once everything's installed, but until then ...

Of course, you're probably going to want to back up that HD first, for all the nice old programs and whatever other goodies are there ...

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some notes....

4.19 is for slot loaders.... slot loaders and tray loaders are completley different animals. 4.19 wont install because its not deisgned for the mac your trying to put it on. the other posters were correct i think about a cdrom update and a modem update (i believe... i cant entirely remember...) Also, it is very possible that at this point your CDROM is dead. (mine is on my rev. d 333mhz tray loader) X must be installed in the first 8GB partition, and unless you have upgraded your hard drive, just about the only thing that will fit on your iMac is X. Also, if you only have the 2MB VRAM, and not the 6MB dont even bother with any version of X.

That being said, someone a few months back did trade me a Rev D. 333Mhz tray loader for an old playstaton i had, and i did get it running with X.

My spes were Rev D (333Mhz, 6MB vram) upgraded hard drive to 7200RPM 80GB unit i had laying around (had to partition it into 2 logical drives, with X on the first partition) 256MB of ram (well, it really is 512MB, but it is high density ram as opposed to low density and the iMac can only recognize half of each ram chip.) And a dead CDROM drive (which even nullified this machines use as a MP3 server, which was going to be its purpose.) and OS X 10.4.3

what i did to get it all going was: installed RAM and big HDD, partition drive into two spaces, install os 9, upgraded it to 9.1, installed all firmware pdates required, updated 9.1 to 9.2.2, installed xPostfacto (so i could install tiger on a machine without firewire ports) since tiger is on DVD, i opened up my mac mini, removed its laptop slot loading drive, removed its connector adapter from the back of it, disassembled the iMac, removed its tray loading drive, took its connecter adaptor off the back of the tray loading drive and transfered it over to the slot loading drive from my mac mini, and installed the mac mini drive with swapped connector into the imac. powered the iMac up with everything all open (this was easier when i used a regular mac monitor to vga adapter on the video out port and hooked the iMac up to an external monitor so that i could leave the iMac open and laying on its side.) used xPostfacto to boot off of my Tiger install DVD, went through the install process (deselecting most other languages and un-needed printer drivers, as 8GB just isnt much space when you remember that most applications want to live on the same partition as X to work happily) Then i connected my new (in pieces) iMac to the network and did all software updates, installed all software i wanted to while i still had the DVD drive hooked up, turned it all off, disassembled my configuration, put the Mac Mini's drive back where it belonged and reassembled my mac mini and my imac.

See, its easy to get X on a tray loader!!! Smile

it ran OK.... but was unbearably slow forr me... as i have other macs to do real things with, this was much better suited for light playing with 9 on it.... so, it is back with 9.2.2 on it these days.... and with the upgrades i did (fast HDD and memory) that thing is REALLY REALLY fast in 9.2.2

...my two cents.

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Tiger is WAAAAYYY too much for this machine ...

evilrobot described installing Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) on the slot loader with 256 MB of RAM ...

Even my 1.2 GHz iBook was dog-slow with Tiger and only 256 MB RAM (bare minimum to run Tiger). It was painfully slow to work with it as I waited for my 1 GB stick ... but I digresss.

Save yourself the trouble of installing a DVD drive, xPostFacto, etc. and stick with an older version of Mac OS X -- I'd recommend Jaguar (10.2), as it only requires 128 MB RAM. Takes a lot less space on the HD, runs a lot quicker than Panther or Tiger on this machine. And it installs from CD-ROM (2), not DVD-ROM.

I've installed Panther on Bondi Blue (233 MHz) and Strawberry (333 MHz) tray-loader iMacs. Runs great on the Strawberry, a little pokey on the Bondi. If I had it to do over again, I'd probably stick with Jaguar like I've got on my Beige G3 tower (375 MHz).

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Panther faster for me

I upgraded my daughter's 300MHz (OCed 233) 384MB Bondi from Jag to Panther and noticed quite a speed and responsiveness improvement in just about everything. I haven't put Tiger on it as it's no longer in service, but I'm thinking I ought to give it a go just to see if/how-much of a speed hit there is. Everything I've read about Tiger so far says it's faster than previous systems on all machines, with the caveat that it needs at least 256MB, and more is better still.

dan k

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8GB limit

I was told in another forum that the 8GB partition limit only applied to OS 10.1 and was not a factor for Jaguar and higher. Is this true?

I wrote down my philosophy for formatting larger harddrives here:
http://www.voy.com/8627/14823.html

This was for the PM6500, but it would apply to the Rev. A iMac too. I designed it around the 8GB limitation idea as well.

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have to disagree about Tiger being slow

It wasn't the OS... it was your lack of RAM, speed of your HD.

When my OEM POS Toshiba HD died in my pb12"dvi, I temporarily used a Barracuda in a fw enclosure. I set up the drive in a special way because I knew that the newly aquired B&W I had originally got the drive for (as I subsequently discovered) would only see the first 128GB of the drive (it was a 200GB drive). I partitioned the drive such that the first partition was 128GB. I booted the pb off the Tiger installation on the first 128GB partition of the fw drive. When I replaced the pb drive (with a Seagate, of course), I then pulled the drive from the fw enclosure and stuck it in the B&W until I could replace it with a 120GB drive. It booted fine... saw the whole partition, as I had hoped.

Now... the original OEM POS Toshiba was a 4200RPM drive. The Seagate I replaced it with was 5400RPM. The Baracuda, as you may well know, is 7200RPM. The B&W is a 350MHz G3, and had 512MB RAM. And with the 7200RPM Barracuda on the internal fast ATA bus... the B&W running Tiger was more responsive, punchier, and all around a faster computer than my 1GHz 12" DVI PowerBook with that OEM POS Toshiba 4200 (as far as the OS was concerned... of course... any super processor intensive tasks, such as video rendering... the pb would wipe the floor with the B&W). The epilogue, though entirely off subject, is that when I got a 120GB drive for the B&W, I put the Barracuda back in the fw enclosure... and the other partitions were still intact and undamaged. Super.

I can't remember where, but I remember reading that when Panther was released, Apple had done all these tweaks to it, that wasn't done with Jaguar, that made the OS work faster on a G3 (than it did in Jag). So... Panther seemed to work faster than Jaguar on a G3. One can only assume that even more G3 enhancements/optimizations were added to Tiger. Unfortunately... as the OS progresses (and all software, for that matter), it becomes more of a RAM hog. Never underestimate the performance gains of having a ton of RAM. Also, because of the OS dependence on Virtual Memory no matter how much RAM you have, a super fast HD will also give a very perceivable performance boost.

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Re: 8GB limit

I was told in another forum that the 8GB partition limit only applied to OS 10.1 and was not a factor for Jaguar and higher. Is this true?

My Beige G3 (266 MHz at the time) would not allow me to install Jaguar (10.2) until I had partitioned the drive to 8+11+11 GB.

I gave my friend a Blueberry iMac G3 (333 MHz, tray-loader) that would not allow me to install Panther (10.2) until I partitioned the drive to 8+12 GB.

My own Blueberry iMac G3 (500 MHz, slot-loader) allowed me to install Panther on a 20 GB drive without any complaints.

I don't think it's a matter of the version of OS X you're trying to install; it seems instead to be a function of the logic board.

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It's an ATA addressing flaw t

It's an ATA addressing flaw that was on the early G3s. Gossamer and PDQ's logic boards were designed with the 8GB limitation-- since the slot loading iMac's motherboard is a PDQ deriative, it inherited the 8GB limitation. I don't know if the 8GB limit applies to OS 9, but I don't see any good reason why it wouldn't.

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re: It's an ATA addressing flaw

moosemanmoo, trayload iMacs are PDQ derivatives (as I'm sure you meant), not the slotloaders.

Also, the flaw does not affect OS 9 booting, only OS X booting. Weird that, but that's the way it is.

dan k

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yup... all is true.

8GB limit is true, and on my iMac i had jag, panther, and tiger... and tiger was the quickest of them all... but, alas, i am still just to imaptient!! LOL and just went back to classic on my iMac because i dont really use it for much. Agreed though, it is much easier to get Jag or panther going... however, since my inital install marathon of Tiger on a DVD i have "acquired" a CD install set of tiger from the usual channels that would make this feat much easier if i were to try it again Smile

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So to summarise:

  • 3 is the correct firmware updater for that model
  • Install the modem and CD-ROM firmware upgrades as well
  • If your HD is larger than 8 gigs (the original was 4GB) partition it so the first partition is less than 8 gigs in size. Install OS X there.
  • Stick to 10.2 - especially as a self-described newbie. XPostFacto is a headf-ck.
  • Back up that whole HD somewhere if there's anything good on it.
  • 10.2 comes on CDs. Boot from CD one (hold down C as you power up). When the installer comes up, look in the menus until you find Disk Utility. Do any partitioning you need to do with that. Verify and repair the disk. Quit DU and you'll be back in the installer.
  • Follow the steps as they're presented to you, and wait.
  • Download and install the combo upgrade to 10.2.8. You can do it automatically with Software Update once you're up and running.

Jon
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And for the final point, make

And for the final point, make sure you are on a broadband connection. There might be over 100MB of updates to get. It mght be worthwhile to go to a Panera for a long lunch and updates if you have WiFi but no broadband.

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