I tried installing it via FireWire from my iMac, but OpenFirmware couldn't find an HFS partition. So I booted with both the OS X drive and the previous OS 9 drive connected, and re-XPostFacto-ed the OS X drive. That let it get as far as displaying a grey Apple logo on the screen, but then it kernel ...

Thanks madmann, but one drive is actually the original that came with the machine (shurley no problems there) and the other has been working fine for the previous owner for some time.

Despite a new personality card and a new processor, the machine is still stalling during installation at the same point and in the same way as before.

Maybe I'll try a third hard drive. >:-|

Thanks, D; my thermal compound should be arriving tomorrow, so I'll let you know how I get on. *crosses fingers*

The box of used Beige PowerMac G3 upgrades I bought on eBay has finally arrived, consisting of

A Wings personality card
Three sticks of RAM, two of unknown size (probably 640MB; irrelevant since I already have 768MB - I'll test and resell)
A VRAM SODIMM (presumably irrelevant since I have a PCI ...

The second stick let the installation whizz through to 3% of writing files without interruption, where it stalled.

1. Remove some of the additional ram. Try only one stick at at time. There may be an issue with compatibility.

I'm trying this now. The first stick I tried showed the same problem, although it was slower in getting there. It would copy a few files (maybe 0.5% worth), then sit and wait for a while ...

I've tried again with a different disk (the Mac had an old 4GB disk in, untouched since '03); the install on this one seems to have stalled at the "Writing files - 4% complete" stage - further than it got with the previous hard drive. I'm not sure whether this is a symptom (the first drive had bad ...

It is indeed at the start of the disk, hence the ability to boot Jaguar.

Well, the partition I've been targeting is 7.71GB in size, and was able to run Jaguar just fine before I borked everything up, so I can't see how that could be the problem.

Is there any Mac OS equivalent to running chkdsk /r on a Windows machine - i.e. that will force a sector-by-sector scan to ...

In spite of the constant spinning up/down of the CD, the machine will let me eject the CD but not the hard drive (since it contains the active system software).

This whole thing just keeps getting more and more confusing.


EDIT: Aha, telling XPF to boot to OS 9, and THEN holding C during boot ...

Would the installer CD load user profiles from the hard drive if it found them? I think that's what seems to be happening here, since when I run programs, the CD spins up, but I see things like XPostFacto on my desktop which (obviously) wouldn't be found on the CD.

The machine is currently stable ...

Is there a way to force it to boot from CD without reformatting? I've tried holding Opt, holding C, and holding Cmd+Opt+Shift+Del whilst booting; the former two boot OS9 from the hard drive, and the latter boots into Darwin and segfaults.

Thanks!

Hi,

I've had a beige G3 for a while, since I picked it up for £15 on eBay. Unfortunately it's not been much use to me since it has only been able to use a ridiculously large Apple monitor that has seen better days (colours won't stay in alignment). To try and move things forward I bought a PCI ...