[passmaster16]

OK, I have a B&W G3 which won't boot up. I loaded 10.3 on it as a clean install. It's a 450 G3 Rev B, with a new 20 gb western digital hard drive and 512mb of ram. When I try to boot it, i get the flashing folder with ? mark. I try to force it to boot to the OS X partition but no luck. I had this same problem a couple months ago when I had 10.2 on it. Now I understand that the Rev B's were supposed to solve the data corruption problems on the IDE bus but I'm at a loss as to what's wrong with this machine. It seems when I reload it, it runs fine for a month or two then has this problem. This last time it happened, I was working on it then it just locked up, the mouse still moved but I couldn't lauch any apps so I shut it down and rebooted, but it wouldn't boot back into OS X. I have no clue here guys. Why would it run fine for a certain period of time then lock up and not boot? The machine is bone stock with no CPU upgrades or overclocking. The firmware is the latest as well. I was thinking of installing an ATA card but I don't want to waste money with that unless I really think that is the issue. Maybe the logic board is hosed for all I know. Any help is greatly appreciated.

[sc_markt]

Originally posted by passmaster16:
OK, I have a B&W G3 which won't boot up. I loaded 10.3 on it as a clean install. It's a 450 G3 Rev B, with a new 20 gb western digital hard drive and 512mb of ram. When I try to boot it, i get the flashing folder with ? mark. I try to force it to boot to the OS X partition but no luck. I had this same problem a couple months ago when I had 10.2 on it. Now I understand that the Rev B's were supposed to solve the data corruption problems on the IDE bus but I'm at a loss as to what's wrong with this machine. It seems when I reload it, it runs fine for a month or two then has this problem. This last time it happened, I was working on it then it just locked up, the mouse still moved but I couldn't lauch any apps so I shut it down and rebooted, but it wouldn't boot back into OS X. I have no clue here guys. Why would it run fine for a certain period of time then lock up and not boot? The machine is bone stock with no CPU upgrades or overclocking. The firmware is the latest as well. I was thinking of installing an ATA card but I don't want to waste money with that unless I really think that is the issue. Maybe the logic board is hosed for all I know. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Not sure I can help but I too had a similar problem. I picked up two used B&W's from work, a rev 1 and a rev 2. The rev II came with a 9GB scsi drive and scsi pci card and a sonnet tempo ATA card which I removed and put in the rev 1. I loaded 10.3 on the rev II (scsi card and HD) and it worked fine for a few hours until I loaded some software on it. It then would not boot up. I fiddled around with it, re-loaded 10.3 and still had the problem after again loading software. (One note: I did notice that when it didn't boot up in OS X, if I booted up in OS 9 and then selected the startup disk as OS 10.3, it worked.) I then decided to remove the 9GB scsi HD and scsi card and swap it with the tempo ATA card and a 20GB seagate ATE HD that was in the rev I.

Well, so far, it's working fine. (Of course, now I'm wondering if it'll crap out in a month or so.) I have the disk partitioned with 9.2.2 on one partition and OS 10.3 on the other.

The software I loaded up wasn't much. Marine aquarium screen saver, Office Vx and updates, some desktop pictures, X Resource graph.

- Mark