trouble upgrading to OS X

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as a couple of you may remember, i'm helping a friend upgrade his beige G3. he's finally gotten a decent usb cd drive, and now we're going to upgrade to X. except...

none of my OS X install discs work. i have install discs for 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2. insert a disc, they load up just fine, but clicking "restart to start the installation" doesn't do anything. i read the OS X install readme, it says you can also start up off an install disc, by either holding C while starting up with the disc inserted, or choosing the install disc as your startup disk. but neither of these work, either. once i hit restart, the drive spits the install disc out, and even if i reinsert it, only OS 9 starts up.

i'm thinking this might be because i have to use an external usb drive....but i have no other choice, the internal cd drive is broken.

any ideas on how i can work with this and get X installed? all his system software (OS 9) is up to date...the installer readme mentions a firmware update, but as far as i know that doesn't exist for the biege. any suggestions would be appreciated.
 
So the solution is to find something that will prevent automatic ejection at restart or shut down. I know Iomega drives have options to set this, but I'm not sure about others. Maybe turn the drive off, shut down, turn it on, and start up holding the C key.

I couldn't find anything that would help on Macupdate; did the CD drive come with any kind of driver? If so (though I doubt it did), see if the driver has options to set ejection or not.
 
and it is an iomega drive. hmm, good thinking Arden...

do you (or anyone else) know how to access these iomega drive options? is it a control panel, or a separate app?

and if not, i can try what you suggested, starting with everything powered off, turning on the drive first, then trying to start off the cd.

thanks man, i'll give this a shot tomorrow...

edit:::::
i neglected to mention, afaik the drive did come with a driver. i didn't install it though, my friend did.
 
In OS 9 I have a control panel called Iomega Drive Options, which lets me set disks to eject automatically upon shutdown or restart (or not, depending on what I want to do). Check out Iomega's driver page for driver options, or just try IomegaWare.
 
You can only install Mac OS X from a bootable CD/DVD drive.

Think about this a minute... your using a USB drive on a system that didn't come with USB, the drive and the USB card both require a driver to run in 9, which means they are not active until after 9 starts up. You can't boot from either the USB card or the connected USB drive... don't you guys see that this is going nowhere... fast!

Go to ebay and do a search for a bootable CD-ROM drive for an Apple system. I would think a cheep old SCSI CD-ROM drive of that type would run about $15 or so.

At any rate, forget wasting any more time on the USB drive, it is not going to work.
 
Also, the access speed for the USB CD drive is so slow! Even if you could use it for booting, you could watch your install complete by sometime tomorrow, if it ever does complete. As racerX said, the drive is not even seen until the drivers load, so won't boot the system.
I don't think any Beige G3 ever shipped with a SCSI CD-Rom, but most any decent speed IDE CD drive should boot the system. An Apple ROM in the CD drive used to be an issue, but I think that is no longer the case since IDE CDs starting shipping with Macs.
 
Originally posted by DeltaMac
I don't think any Beige G3 ever shipped with a SCSI CD-Rom...
Click to expand...

All Beige G3s shipped with SCSI, I was talking about using a cheep external drive that might boot the system. If they have already paid for the USB drive (I'm guessing it is a CD-RW), then they wouldn't want to pay that much just for something that can boot their system.

:rolleyes:

On the other hand, there is an internal SCSI bus on that system, so if they wanted they could install a SCSI CD-ROM drive in it internally also (seems like more trouble than it is worth though).
 
True enough, RacerX. And your point about an external SCSI CD is a good one. Do you actually see these for sale? A beige G3 that was not sold with any SCSI internals, may not have the needed ribbon cable inside, one more thing to locate. One often does not know when to stop throwing good money after bad. A replacement internal CD drive that will allow booting, and give faster read speeds as a bonus, should be fairly cheap, too.
 
Originally posted by DeltaMac
Do you actually see these for sale? A beige G3 that was not sold with any SCSI internals, may not have the needed ribbon cable inside, one more thing to locate.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't think a SCSI ribbon would be all that hard to find.

On the issue of finding one of these for sale, I bought one (for $15) so I would have a bootable drive for my clients. As a service provider, having my own CD-ROM drive that can boot older systems is important.

As luck would have it, I have a clients Beige G3/233 with me. It seems to boot the Mac OS 9.0 and Mac OS X v10.2 CDs without any problem from the SCSI external CD-ROM drive I have.

Any other questions?
 
Originally posted by RacerX
You can only install Mac OS X from a bootable CD/DVD drive.
Click to expand...

you're totally right. thanks for the advice, this should of been obvious to me...

and cheryl, thanks for those links.

at least external scsi drives are pretty cheap. :)
 
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