CMOS Battery Replacement

W

welchm

Registered
Hi. My Mac G3 (10.2.8) was working fine for some time; then it got a little errartic. I knew it was generally still working, because even though I couldn't see my usual login screen; I could still hit my Apache web page from my network or the outside world.

I finally figured out that my CMOS battery was getting low with a voltage meter and replaced it.

I now either get the Disk with a Question Mark (can't find where to boot),

-OR-

I can boot from an install CD & get into the Installer's Disk Utility. I can look at my 3 partions; including the normal MAC OS X boot-up partion... I ran utilities that tell me Disks are fine and ran repair and everything said 'OK'.

I still can't get the machine to re-recognize to boot from the normal OS X partion like before. I tried the Option-Command-P-R and taking out the CMOS battery for awhile and unplugging the machine. Still can't get it to boot back onto the OS X partion on a machine I'm 99 percent sure is otherwise fine.

Is there a way to boot from a CD, use the Installer Disk Utility to say "hey, boot from this Partion!"

Help/Advice is GREATLY appreciated.

Michael
 
Boot while holding down the Option key and all partitions with bootable copies of either OS X or OS 9 should be displayed. If OS X and OS 9 are on the same volume you will only see OS X. Select your OS X partition and click on the right pointing arrow to complete booting in OS X. Then go to System Preferences > Startup Disk and select your OS X partition as the boot volume.

Sometimes you can force a boot into OS X by holding Option X during the boot process, but in my experience that is not as reliable as the Option boot.

Actually you can do the same thing in OS 9.2.2 but since the objective is to set OS X as the boot volume, that would take another reboot.
 
Just hold the 'X' key down at starup, not Option-X..
Booting while holding the Option key only works on the newer machines, I think G4/AGP and up.

Booting from the OS CD, there should be a command to choose the Startup disk in the Menus.
 
bobw said:
Just hold the 'X' key down at starup, not Option-X..
Booting while holding the Option key only works on the newer machines, I think G4/AGP and up.
Click to expand...
They say the three signs of old age are failing memory and I forget what the other two are. You are, of course, right.
 
Hehe... either way, no G3 machine (with the exception of some iMacs) could use the "hold X for Mac OS X" and "hold 9 for Mac OS 9" features of Open Firmware. Only the AGP G4 and later machines supported that functionality. Yikes! G4 machines, B&W G3 machines, and beige G3 machines do not support direct booting into a specific OS via keyboard commands at startup.

These same machines do not support the "hold Option to select a bootable partition" bootup key command either.
 
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