First time Mac owner w/ a huge issue

H

H0ck3yphreak

Registered
Hey all! I just bought two iMac G3's for my kids to use instead of my PC's and I must mention this is the first time I've attempted to mess with anything Apple, well, instead of my iPod. Anywhoo, These G3's came without hard drives, which in turn no-os. After doing some research I thought I had found the Tiger 10.4 would work great. So I took some old IDE HDD's that were used in a Win Environment, threw them into the G3's and have attempted to load the Tiger 10.4 CD version and have gotten absolutly no where. I've searched google so much, I want to stab myself in the eyes. I've tried to boot from OF, nothing. I've tried the "c" key on bootup, and just get the flashing "?". I've tried the option key on bootup and just get a blue screen with two buttons, noneofwhich are a CD-ROM or HDD. Would anyone be able to help out a novice Mac-dude? Thanks all.
 
Double-check that the drive jumpers are NOT set for cable select, or slave. Those jumpers should be set for master.

Boot to the Tiger installer DVD, and go straight to the Utilities menu.
Choose Disk Utility, and when that opens, click on your hard drive in the left column. It will show a listing for the manufacturer's info, so click on that entry, then click the Partitions tab.
Click the Volume Scheme drop-down, and choose 1 Partition from that list. Then click Apply, or Partition - whatever shows on the button in the lower right corner. Click continue until you see the partition is happening. This will only take a few seconds. I usually go back to the erase tab, and Clcik the Erase button. You can name your volume, if you like. Make sure the format is Mac OS Extended (journaled), Then continue with the Erase. Go back to the installer window by Quitting the Disk Utility from the menu, and continue on with your OS X install.
 
Thanks Delta for the reply. The HDD is set to Master, and I don't have the Tiger DVD's cause I was informed that the iMac's I have only have CD-ROM's. Is there anyway to install from the CD's? Thanks.
 
Yes, Tiger was available on CD's but only on an exchange direct to Apple. Good luck finding a set of CDs for Tiger now. You can check on eBay, maybe. Better bet would be Panther (10.3), which is on CD's
 
Yep, and that's what I did, exchanged the DVD's with Apple and got the Tiger CD's; however, your saying I should go with Panther?...well that suxors
 
N, you misunderstand. If you have the set of CDs for Tiger - that will work to simply boot to the disk #1. You should be able to boot to that disk simply by holding the letter C.
The option-boot should, at the least, show your CD installer.

If not, try a different hard drive. You may be trying to use a hard drive that is not firmware compatible.

Alsol, just as a test, disconnect the hard drive only, and try to boot to the installer.
 
On my old iMac G4, the DVD drive is slow and it is difficult to do any system install as the the Mac time-out before the DVD is full speed. My solution was an external MacBook used in target mode.

So if your disk spins and then stops without booting, you can try changing your CD drive.
 
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