Halp! with G3 desktop - freezing
Posted: July 25th, 2008, 6:39 am
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 Radeon 9200 (Mac Edition, since flashing cards gave nothing but corrupt displays). Installed that yesterday and it finally booted with a non-corrupt display on a reasonably-sized LCD flatscreen with no colour issues.
My next step was to install Tiger (to get XCode - the main reason I use Macs). Now, this required a DVD drive, so I currently have the case open and a transplanted drive from another machine attached. I installed XPostFacto without issues and the installation started just fine. However, it got to the stage of "Installing Base System" and got stuck - the mouse still moved and the progress bar was still animated, but it wasn't going anywhere or doing anything. I'd read in the release notes for XPF that Firewire cards could cause this, so I dutifully removed the USB/FW combo I had installed and tried again. The same problem (albeit with a different number of "minutes remaining"). I tried again, just to be sure, but without joy. I tried booting into OS 9, which got as far as the desktop (with menu and icons) and then hung.
As a last resort (having read posts claiming that such problems could be caused by disk errors that could only be cured by a reformat) I tried setting it to Erase and Install. Same problem, but that left me without a bootable installation (not that I had one anyway, since OS 9 wouldn't boot usably and OS X redirected to the CD drive). So I reinstalled OS 9, which worked, but the machine hung within 5 minutes of booting (movable mouse but "busy" pointer). On the second attempt, I managed to download XPostFacto, but it crashed again when I ran it. At that point, I gave up for the night.
This morning I tried again, and XPostFacto ran, and I told it to boot back into the Tiger DVD. I got to the same point in the installation (albeit once again with a different number of minutes remaining) and the same symptoms showed.
I'm presuming that the freezing in OS 9 and the freezing in Tiger Setup are related. The machine has a 120GB Hitachi drive in it (onto which I'm installing in a <8GB partition at the beginning of the drive). It has a 333MHz G3 (I think that was an upgrade by the previous owner from a G3 266 or so), and the RAM is maxed out at 768MB. It has the standard personality card, a ZIP drive and a floppy drive (both connected).
Can anyone offer any possible causes and/or solutions to the issue?
Thanks,
Ed
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 Radeon 9200 (Mac Edition, since flashing cards gave nothing but corrupt displays). Installed that yesterday and it finally booted with a non-corrupt display on a reasonably-sized LCD flatscreen with no colour issues.
My next step was to install Tiger (to get XCode - the main reason I use Macs). Now, this required a DVD drive, so I currently have the case open and a transplanted drive from another machine attached. I installed XPostFacto without issues and the installation started just fine. However, it got to the stage of "Installing Base System" and got stuck - the mouse still moved and the progress bar was still animated, but it wasn't going anywhere or doing anything. I'd read in the release notes for XPF that Firewire cards could cause this, so I dutifully removed the USB/FW combo I had installed and tried again. The same problem (albeit with a different number of "minutes remaining"). I tried again, just to be sure, but without joy. I tried booting into OS 9, which got as far as the desktop (with menu and icons) and then hung.
As a last resort (having read posts claiming that such problems could be caused by disk errors that could only be cured by a reformat) I tried setting it to Erase and Install. Same problem, but that left me without a bootable installation (not that I had one anyway, since OS 9 wouldn't boot usably and OS X redirected to the CD drive). So I reinstalled OS 9, which worked, but the machine hung within 5 minutes of booting (movable mouse but "busy" pointer). On the second attempt, I managed to download XPostFacto, but it crashed again when I ran it. At that point, I gave up for the night.
This morning I tried again, and XPostFacto ran, and I told it to boot back into the Tiger DVD. I got to the same point in the installation (albeit once again with a different number of minutes remaining) and the same symptoms showed.
I'm presuming that the freezing in OS 9 and the freezing in Tiger Setup are related. The machine has a 120GB Hitachi drive in it (onto which I'm installing in a <8GB partition at the beginning of the drive). It has a 333MHz G3 (I think that was an upgrade by the previous owner from a G3 266 or so), and the RAM is maxed out at 768MB. It has the standard personality card, a ZIP drive and a floppy drive (both connected).
Can anyone offer any possible causes and/or solutions to the issue?
Thanks,
Ed