Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Macaddict87 · Jan 6, 2003, 07:18 PM

I have a Power Mac 6500/250 with 128mb of ram and OS 9.1. If I installed a Sonnet G3 upgrade card would I be able to run OS 10.2 with XPostFacto? I noticed that it wasn't listed in XPostFacto's list of supported machines.

CheesePuff · Jan 6, 2003, 07:28 PM

Same machine, but with 64 MB RAM and no upgrade card, just 225 MHz processor. I got OS X 10.1 (10.2 does not work) to install and when it restarted it kernal paniced and thats it.

Metzen · Jan 6, 2003, 07:29 PM

Originally posted by Macaddict87:
I have a Power Mac 6500/250 with 128mb of ram and OS 9.1. If I installed a Sonnet G3 upgrade card would I be able to run OS 10.2 with XPostFacto? I noticed that it wasn't listed in XPostFacto's list of supported machines.

I don't think it'll work (I have a 6400/180 with 72MB of RAM and a 6500/225 128MB of RAM with a 400MHz Sonnet G3), but I did read somewhere that someone got it to work on a clone that used the same (or similar?) motherboard as the 6500/6400 series. They supposedly did it by installing OS X first on a supported machine, then switched the harddrives of the 6500-clone machine with the newly installed OS X, used XPostFacto, and posted that it worked.

I've been meaning to try it (I have an extra harddrive laying around) but laziness has gotten the better of me lately.

macmike42 · Jan 6, 2003, 08:13 PM

Heh. My router is a Power Mac 6500/250. It runs a nice stripped-down Debian, as OS X/Darwin seemed to be overkill. (Then again 64MB of RAM, a 250MHz CPU, a 4GB HD, and the shear size of the thing seem like overkill for a router!) It certainly beats the pants off my old LinkSys in terms of speed, reliability, and customizability, plus it hurts more if I throw it at you!

I wouldn't try running OS X on a machine that maxes out at 128MB of RAM, but the only way for you to know for sure is to try. Also remember that the 6500 has an ATI RAGE IIc graphic "accelerator", which uses up to 4MB of regular RAM as VRAM, so not only will you have less than 128MB to work with, the OS X video drivers may not deal with this well. If you do decide to give it a shot, make sure to keep a log. I want to see high-res photographs of those kernel panics!

Side note: does anyone know what the engineers at Apple were smoking when they decided to use a SCSI CD-ROM drive and an ATA hard drive in this crazy machine?

trusted_content · Jan 6, 2003, 09:56 PM

OS X wont work with any G3 upgrade cards as such cards require an extension in order to get the system to do its processing on the upgrade card instead of on the original OEM processor... unless someone writes a KEXT that allows this, you're out of luck.

bstad · Jan 6, 2003, 10:45 PM

OS X wont work with any G3 upgrade cards as such cards require an extension in order to get the system to do its processing on the upgrade card instead of on the original OEM processor... unless someone writes a KEXT that allows this, you're out of luck

Wow....I guess I need to tell that to my 9600 with a PowerLogix G3-300 card, so it will stop running OSX!

If you want your machine to be just as confused as my 9600, go to xlr8yourmac.com, he's got a couple of links to utilities that will let you enable your cache in OSX...runs just fine!

trusted_content · Jan 6, 2003, 11:14 PM

For the second time tonight, I stand corrected.

I think I may have been just thinking of Nubus upgrade cards, as that certainly seems to be the case with them.

Off to writing my imaginary programming language on an old 7100/66 then ;]

Metzen · Jan 7, 2003, 01:04 AM

Originally posted by Metzen:
I've been meaning to try it (I have an extra harddrive laying around) but laziness has gotten the better of me lately.

Go here.

Search for:
"OSX on a UMAX C500"
It'll take you about a 3rd of the way down. There's where you'll find what I was talking about.

Errr... On second thought, I'll just post the relevant quote here:

The 6400 Zone:
OSX on a UMAX C500: Terry was able to install OSX on a C500 by first installing it on a Beige G3 and then moving the HD over to his C500. This is one theory I thought might work for the 6400/6500 and its good to hear it can work. Thanks Terry.

[Hi Thomas:
I too have had trouble installing OS X from the boot CD. What I finally did was install OS X using a Beige G3 and then simply moving the drive to my C500. Of course I have a minimal install of 9.1 on a very small partition and the 1st and largest partition has X. I am using the latest version of Xpostfacto to boot into X.

We are talking X.2.2 here. I have an old ATI Mach64 video card and a Realtek8139 based ethernet card in my 2 PCI slots. I am even using an old 12" monochrome Macintosh display. My C500 has a ZIFF based CPU slot with a 280Mhz. Mactell G3 card with 1MB L2 cache in it. I also have the maximum 144MB ram (16MB on the motherboard) in it.

I will try something similar with a similarly outfitted Umax C600 tonight. The C500 has been stable since I put X in it a couple of days ago.
- Terry]

And here is a link and quote confirming that the 6400/6500 series share the same motherboard as the C500.

Welcome to Tanzania:
The StarMax Macs use a new kind of motherboard design, named Tanzania and codesigned by Apple and Motorola (see "Systems: Apple Unveils Its New Platform Design,quot;News, Macworld, June 1996). The other Mac clones use one of Apple's existing motherboard designs: the Alchemy design from the Performa 5000 and 6000 series, used in Power Computing's PowerBase and Umax's C500 and C600 systems; the Catalyst design from the Power Mac 7200, used in the Power Computing PowerTower and Umax SuperMac J700; and the Tsunami design from the Power Mac 9500, used in the Power Computing PowerTower Pro, DayStar Genesis, and Umax SuperMac S900L.

Gul Banana · Jan 7, 2003, 02:20 AM

I know it works, because we've done it at my club

Hard drive swapping and X Post Facto are indeed the way to go. The problem is that it ran so slowly we, too, ended up putting Debian on it instead... it makes a nice xterm.

Macaddict87 · Jan 7, 2003, 06:44 PM

OS X wont work with any G3 upgrade cards as such cards require an extension in order to get the system to do its processing on the upgrade card instead of on the original OEM processor... unless someone writes a KEXT that allows this, you're out of luck

Wow....I guess I need to tell that to my 9600 with a PowerLogix G3-300 card, so it will stop running OSX!

If you want your machine to be just as confused as my 9600, go to xlr8yourmac.com, he's got a couple of links to utilities that will let you enable your cache in OSX...runs just fine!

I think that an upgrade to a 6500 would work differently than a 9600 upgrade since in the 9600 you replace the processor card and in the 6500 you use the L2 cache slot. I remember reading in a Macworld review that the upgrade card installer used a simple extension that directed all processor traffic to the L2 cache slot. Since Sonnet dosen't officially support this card for use with OS X, the solution would probably be from a third-party. Then again, I may be talking out of my ass. Can anyone confirm this?