Hi all. I hope some of you are more knowledgeable than me in this area and can lend me a hand.

I just digged out an old mini-tower beige G3 machine that I had stored to have a play with. It's got a bloated install of OS 8.6 and I wanted to reinstall the OS.

According to Apple this model is compatible with OS-X so I borrowed the discs from a friend just to try it out and see if it'd work. Unfortunately the machine fails to boot from the CD while holding down C upon boot up. The CD spins up and after a few seconds the HD kicks in and loads the OS.

I tried running the install from within the OS and it loads up and presents me with a screen with a button to restart in order to continue the installation. After i press it an error message comes up saying it couldn't set the CD as the boot device in the Startup Disk control panel. If I do it manually and restart nothing happens.

So I figured there must actually be some incompatibility and forgot about it and wipped out my OS9 CD but the machine fails to boot from that too!

I've checked some forums on the web that suggest a few things like getting into open firmware and running key-commands to manually boot from CD but it all seems to not work.

The only thing i can think of at the moment is the fact that i replaced the apple CD drive with an old PC one after it died a while ago. Could it be that only apple drives can boot from CD? i plugged in my recent LiteON CD-writer from my PC and if I hold C when booting up the machine just resets and sometimes the screen remains blank until i press the power buttin or reset the machine.

Sorry for the long post;
Any ideas?

Cheers

Could be 1 of a few things..
Which OS are you trying to install? Beige G3's 'should' work with X up to 10.2, Maybe 10.3 with a diff vid card and a patch or 2. 10.2 never would install on my old beige G3 however. They are notorious for this..
Also, is the OS on a DVD? Does the Beige G3 have a DVD drive? As i remember, they all had plane CD drives as standard. So naturally a DVD OS install isnt going to work in this case.
Plus, you say the OS disc is borrowed, if its a disc supplied with a different model of mac, it may be one of the awkward discs which will only work with the model of Mac it was supplied with. So this could be your answer too.

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Paul

Hi Paul, thanks for your reply.

Thanks for that. The OS-X version is indeed 10.2, so that might be one explanation.

I had no idea about the machine-specific OS versions. The OS9 disc i have came from an iMac and does say imac on it and on the readme file...so that'll be another explanation.

I've long lost my 8.6 discs, so i'm afraid there's no way I can reinstall the OS on this machine...

Oh well, might just dismantle the thing and sell off the parts or something.

Hi,
As Paul said, it wont boot natively from a 10.3 install disk.
However you can get it to work witha brilliant shareware app called XPOSTFACTO. I've used it to install 10.3 on two beige G3 Macs & it worked a treat.
10.3 is much quicker than 10.2, so it's definitely worth the effort.

Geoff

Hi Geoff

Thanks for that, looks like a very handy little utility. Just tried it but unfortunately it doesn't run on OS 8.x; needs OS 9...

Looks like i need to see if i can find a copy of OS 9 just to run that utility in order to install OS X. If I find one HOPEFULY i'll be able to install it!

This is why I won't do any troubleshooting anymore on old G3's. A major pain in the ass.

You need to swap the master/slave settings between the HD and the CD-ROM, making the CD the master. Then, atfer you install, switch them back so OSX will boot off the HD.

Here's some info: http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~rakerman/g3-osx.html

Thanks for the tip, HonkyMoFo, I'll give that a try! If the issue IS that, then it's a very silly issue!

Ok, I've been trying this for quite a while with no success. Today i decided to get down and dirty with the thing, screw-driver in one hand.

No matter what I do I can't get the beast to boot from a CD... period!

I've swapped CD drives (used my Pioneer DVD reader and a LiteOn CD-writer in addition to the old 4x reader).
I've downloaded the PPC version of one of the Linux distros to see if THAT would at least boot and still no luck! Unplugged the HD (tried HD and CD on all combinations, including each in its own IDE channel) and left only the CD reader plugged in and only manage to get the good old floppy disk icon with a flashing question mark over it.

At one point i actually thought the 'C' key on the keyboard mught be dudd but I can type with it fine when i boot into the old OS 8.6 installed on the drive.

I had actually sort of given up on OSX for this machine and was just gonna play around with linux but the booting problem isn't related to the OSX disks themselves!

Sorry to bang on about this, but this is my very last cry for help before I strip the damned thing for parts and sell it off!

Any ideas... at all...?

Cheers
Mario

We have a beige G3 with exactly this problem too at work. The only CD that it will boot from is the one that it came with. No other CD I've tried will work including generic OS 9.0.4 and 9.2.1 CDs. Your OS9 iMac won't work as it's only good for iMacs. However it will boot from a valid system on aqn external SCSI HD. Using this method it's been possible for me to upgrade it to OS9.2.2 I don't know if it's going to be possible to install OSX on this Mac as the OSX installer seems to want to boot from the CD to work. When I get the time I'm going to have go at putting OSX on our G3 and if I find a way I'll post back with the method, but I think that it's going to involve an external SCSI device of some type...

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RockinRollin' VampireMan

Quote SugarBox:

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We have a beige G3 with exactly this problem too at work. The only CD that it will boot from is the one that it came with. No other CD I've tried will work including generic OS 9.0.4 and 9.2.1 CDs. Your OS9 iMac won't work as it's only good for iMacs. However it will boot from a valid system on aqn external SCSI HD. Using this method it's been possible for me to upgrade it to OS9.2.2 I don't know if it's going to be possible to install OSX on this Mac as the OSX installer seems to want to boot from the CD to work. When I get the time I'm going to have go at putting OSX on our G3 and if I find a way I'll post back with the method, but I think that it's going to involve an external SCSI device of some type...

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Thanks, I'd appreciate any feedback from your efforts.

Mario