10.1 Install CD won't boot on beige G3

M

Mr P

Registered
As the subject tells you, I have a Beige G3 333MHz with 384Mb ram that I'm trying to install 10.1 on, but the CD won't boot properly. It starts booting and I get the happy mac screen. After a while it switches to a blank blue screen and that's abuot it. I can hear the CD doing a couple of further reads but then stops and I get no further than the blue screen.

Anyone else seen this?

I have tried removing PCI cards, internal hard drives, zapping PRAM but to no avail. Even tried swapping CD drive. nope... I'm apparently not allowed to use 10.1.


Any ideas??


Oh... I have used the same CD to install 10.1 on a G4 so the CD itself should be OK. Right?
 
This may sound like a dumb question.. but how long did you wait?

The reason I ask is because I had thought the same thing as you, so I restarted... when it seemed to be taking forever, I left the room, called someone, and then came back over a 1/2 hour later. It was at the installer screen. I started the install, called someone else and it was done sometime after I hung up (and it was a long phone call).
For some reason, I had to be *really* patient!
 
The same idea have crossed my mind so I left it for an hour or so, only to come back to see that bleeming blue screen.

Baur - was you machine also a Biege G3?


The install CD is not an upgrade CD but a full install one.

Is there any way of copying the CD to a drive and boot from there?
Does OS X ALWAYS have to be installed from a CD?
 
Do you have any upgrade cards or off-brand CD Rom drives? That could be the problem. On my Blue iMac 350MHz I had to wait a good 10 minutes at that "blue screen of death" for it to start, but it seems that you've already tried that.

I've never actually even seen a real life Beige G3 let alone install 10 on one, but I've heard the horror stories, but I've also heard the success stories. It'd have to be something with the G3 if you've successfully used that CD on a G4.

And to answer your other queston, yes, the 10 installer was made so it must be ran off of a real bootable CD, can't run it from your hard drive. This isn't like Windows :) hehe
 
Yes, I do have a Beige G3.

I actually tried a number of times (10.0, not 10.1) to install with no luck, even though it worked on a G4. Eventually, I tried a different disc and it worked fine.
As it turns out, there was a tiny scratch at a portion of my disc that contained booting information for the Beige machines that wasn't needed for the newer machines. I don't know if that could be causing it, but maybe... Have you tried booting in verbose mode to see where it gets stuck at? (Command-v on startup, if you don't know)
 
Baur - my theory about scratched/dodgy CD as well. Guess I will have to get hold of a new disc.
Yes I did try verbose mode and it seemed to load fine but then switched to the blue screen.:mad:
 
I've had (and still have) problems installing X10.1 from original CD.
I succeeded in completing macosX installation doing this:
run normally the X installer under Macos9 until it reboots

-when it reboots, start with OpenFirmware
('O'+'F'+'alt'+'apple' keys simultaneously)
-wait for a while (4-5 seconds) then continue the startup typing 'BOOT'
(supposing CD drive is not ready, let it start up)
-if it boots ok, -finished-
-if not, press 'apple'+'switchon/off' keys simultaneously
-re-type 'BOOT' until it boots
-if it hangs up, start macos9 with 'option' key pressed
-after you see the macos9 prompt screen restart suddenly with 'control'+'apple'+'switchon/off' keys and repeat to the beginnig
-if it starts installing, continue to move cursor periodically, because of a bug in the energy saver on gossamer, who put to sleep cd and/or HD.

that's all
hoping it's worth...
 
Originally posted by Mr P
As the subject tells you, I have a Beige G3 333MHz with 384Mb ram that I'm trying to install 10.1 on, but the CD won't boot properly. It starts booting and I get the happy mac screen. After a while it switches to a blank blue screen and that's abuot it. I can hear the CD doing a couple of further reads but then stops and I get no further than the blue screen.

Anyone else seen this?
Click to expand...

I have seen this, also with a Beige G3 tower. I don't remember 333 Mhz option on the beige boxen; I think the next jump was to 350 in the blue-n-white machines. The reason I mention it is that my G3 is a 300, and I had overclocked it to 333, which was fine for OS9, but when the X Public Beta came along, I remember the same sort of wierd booting issues. I eventually did get X installed, but it would kernel panic every couple hours, so I set it back to 300 and it was fine.

I know, you didn't mention OC'ing the machine, and my memory may be faulty, but my experience is that OC'ing the beige G3 was dodgy, to say the least. If you're not OCed, ignore this post... :)
 
According to Apple, you're right - there was never a 333 MHz option. I was told that on the phone when I was troubleshooting my booting issues.
On the other hand, I tried it at 233, 266 and 300 (as I remember) with the same results on all of them. I've had no issues at 333 - at least not that I can identify as being because of that.
 
Thanks for the tips Kronos. I will try them when time allows and let you know of the outcome.


Reg. the speed of my mac - Apple Spec's isn't all that complete. Believe me they made a Beige 333MHz version, based on the platinum main board. Look at KB article ID 24924.
Now the thought of overclocking struck me as well. I used to run the processor at 350Mhz but swapped back to the orig 333 when I ran into problem.
 
Completed an install on a G3/266 yesterday without any problems along the way.

One thing I DID do was to reformat and partition the drive as well as installing a fresh copy of OS 9.x before doing OS X.

Good luck.

Originally posted by dricci
I've never actually even seen a real life Beige G3 let alone install 10 on one, but I've heard the horror stories, but I've also heard the success stories. It'd have to be something with the G3 if you've successfully used that CD on a G4.
Click to expand...
 
I'm having trouble even getting the machine (beige g3 tower, 384 RAM, no extra PCI cards) to boot...it will neither boot off my original 10.0 install disc, nor the 10.1 upgrade disc.

When I hold down option, it sees the disc as bootable, but when I select it, it goes to the gray screen with spinning rainbow for about two seconds, and then reboots.

Only 9.1 is currently on the machine; it boots fine into 9.1. We've zapped the PRAM a couple times, but I don't know what else to try. I've done plenty of installs with this set of discs, so I don't think it's the discs.

Any suggestions?

Thanks....
 
i had a similar problem on my g3 333. what i diid was to unplug my monitor from my mac. start up ....wait awhile (2 min) and plug the monitor back in.
i dont know if this is bad for you mac but it worked for me.
 
I'd check the memory. Beige G3's are picky with their DIMMs, especially new ones and high densities (>128MB).

If you have a 256 dimm and a 128, or a 256 and two 64's, try taking out the 256 for the OS X instal and see what happens.


For the record, i've got a beige g3/266 minitower with 192MB ram running X.1 just fine. A while back I threw the Apple24x CD Rom drive out on the street and stomped on it, then ran over it with my car, and put in an IDE yamaha 8x IDE CD-RW ... Both X and X.1 booted installed from this drive no problem.

That brings up another thought .. take that 24x drive out of there (set it on fire, blow it up, whatever), and try another CD-ROM drive. You never know, but I had lots of weird problems related to the original cd-rom drive.
 
a couple of small ideas here. they are probably useless but here goes. first - about booting from option key and choosing. this appears to be very iffy thing w/osx. I 've seen other reports about it not working properly and i've never gotten it to show all available systems. go back to pressing c key for the disks. if you get to the happy mac and never ending spin, keep hitting the restart till you get pass this. probably not the answer an apple tech would give you, but it eventually gets me past this everytime.
2nd idea - I seem to recall trying to just install osx from disk mounted on desktop the first time. the installer launched and then took over the reboot (with permission of course) and then installed everything fine.
3rd idea that just came to me - try inserting disk and choosing it as startup disk from the 9x control panel. this has gotten me thru non recognition a few times with disks. Note: at least one disk i did this with would not let me go back and choose the harddrive to boot from. It just kept rebooting to itself. I had to quickly manually eject the disc after it shut off and before it started accessing the disk. It had a normal boot after that.
now all of this might be just wrong for a beige G3. I have no experience with one. I jumped from an old lc575 to my imac. My life has changed to say theleast. But these tricks have all worked for me at one time or another since going to osx.
oh and the common cure for many installing pains these days - run your software update and make sure you have gotten totally & COMPLETELY up to date this way - at least a couple of new firmware's have been issued that are required.
 
To install 10 on a beige g3 computer you will need the apple ide cdrom that comes with the computer and you will need to set the jumper on the back of the cdrom to master not slave. This is an issue with the beige g3 and possibly the rev1 blue and white also.

I have installed a few of these computers and this is the only process that I have found that works every time.

If you are lucky enough to have a beige g3 that supports master and slave make sure you don't have a conflict once the cdrom jumper is changed.

the internal hard drive is on a different bus to the cdrom.
 
I have a beige G3 233. I have had continual problems trying to install OS X.1. The only way I could get the install CD recognized was to switch the jumpers on the CD drive. I was able to install the program but have never been able to get it to boot up. I even tried disconnecting all other drives(I have a HD connected to an ATA 66 Sonnet PCI card) including the CD drive. No luck. I would constantly get a blank white screen with the words "unknown word" written at the top or the same white screen with "can't open" repeated across the top for about 2 and a half lines before it would finally default to OS 9.2 which I also had installed on the HD. I have since erased all vestiges of OS X. The process has left me with an apparently permanent boot problem where with only OS 9.2 installed I first get a white screen with "unknown word" and must reboot(option-cmd-start) and immediately hold down the control key . This produces an option asking me to type "bye" to boot from yhe OS 9 system file. I don't know what this portends for the future of my machine, but it's very very frustrating.

jmcmike
 
Zaping the PRAM *should* remove that annoying message for you (or at least, when I was getting the "Can't Open" message, that's what did it for me).
At least one of the issues I also faces was a hard drive that was too slow in spinning up... the firmware wasn't very patient, and I finally moved OS X off that drive onto another one - that did the trick, now I can get in without a problem, and then I hold down the Option key to get into OS 9.
 
Thank you. I have tried zapping the pram a number of times. No luck. I currently have two HDs, both connected to the ata 66 card. Only one has a system file(OS 9.2.2) but the machine will not automatically default to it.

When I called Apple support about my problem with OS X install, they somehow(after 45 min. ) arrived at the conclusion that I had a conflict with my video card(I use the video that came with the machine). How would that matter?
 
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