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BigYellowMonkey · Oct 22, 2003, 12:46 AM

I've had a beige G3 running OS X 10.2 since it was released, and up until about 2 months ago, it ran without any real problems. I reinstalled a few times for various reasons, but I never had any serious issues with it.

Well, all that has changed. I had the original 4GB ATA drive in there, as well as 100GB and 40GB ATA drives via a Sonnet Tempo ATA/100 PCI card. I purchased a blue&white G3, and moved the sonnet card, along with the two large drives, into the new b&w. I then removed the stock 9GB SCSI drive, as well as the SCSI PCI card, from the blue machine, and installed them into the beige one.
Both the 4GB ATA and the 9GB SCSI drives in the beige have been reformatted to HFS+ (extended), as they should be, with my jaguar CD's. I've installed OS X onto the 4GB drive many times before. Since I know you need a partition smaller than 8GB to install OS X onto, I partitioned the 9GB drive into two partitions sharing the space 50/50. I've tried installing both OS X 10.2 and Server 10.2 onto both drives, both of which have been used before to install and run OS X on that same machine.
I've tried switching RAM, as well as installing on the ATA drive without the SCSI card and drive installed. The RAM i've tried has all worked for OS X installations before.

Just to clear it up, what's actually going wrong isn't during the actual installation. The install finishes just fine (if I deselect all the extra stuff). The reason for that is, I can't get it to boot to the HD after the first disc is done installing. It reboots, and then rather than giving me a bootup screen, it gives me a white screen that says _ at the beginning, and that's it. I've tried zapping the PRAM, going into the firmware and typing reset-all, boot, bye and all the rest of it. I'm at a loss.

Does anyone have anything that might be of any help? I need to get this machine running so i can install Tenon's iTools on it and get my web server back up and running!

Any help is greatly appreciated!

-Biggie!

BigYellowMonkey · Oct 22, 2003, 08:43 PM

Anyone??

-Biggie!

jasong · Oct 22, 2003, 09:02 PM

Well two things to try. First is that the OS has to be entirely within the first 8 GB of the disk, not in a partition smaller than 8 GB, so one of your OS's is outside of that range. Try only installing one of the OS's and see if you can get it to work that way.

2nd, when my Beige went berserk, I removed everything from the machine, RAM, all PCI Cards, the extra video RAM, the battery, the personality card. Everything that could be removed was removed. Let it sit for 15 minutes or so with no power. I then put the minimum number of components back in to boot it up, hit the motherboard reset switch (in the back left corner of the motherboard) and it booted up. I then shut it down and put the rest of my RAM and cards back in.

Good luck.

-- Jason

BigYellowMonkey · Oct 23, 2003, 12:42 AM

Originally posted by jasong:
Well two things to try. First is that the OS has to be entirely within the first 8 GB of the disk, not in a partition smaller than 8 GB, so one of your OS's is outside of that range. Try only installing one of the OS's and see if you can get it to work that way.

2nd, when my Beige went berserk, I removed everything from the machine, RAM, all PCI Cards, the extra video RAM, the battery, the personality card. Everything that could be removed was removed. Let it sit for 15 minutes or so with no power. I then put the minimum number of components back in to boot it up, hit the motherboard reset switch (in the back left corner of the motherboard) and it booted up. I then shut it down and put the rest of my RAM and cards back in.

Good luck.

-- Jason

Ok. I removed the VRM (voltage regulator module), PRAM battery, the one 256MB stick of RAM, the ATA HD, the processor, the personality card, and the extra VRAM, and all the SCSI hardware (drive and PCI card) were already removed. I then plugged the power back in, pushed the cuda (mobo reset) button, and unplugged it again (don't ask my why, just thought i'd do that).

Now I'm gonna let it sit for another 10 minutes or so, and then put it all back together and try again. I hope it works...

I'll post once i see what happens. I have a sneaking suspicion that its not gonna work, but we'll see. It seems that I need a different solution every time something goes wrong with OS X on this machine...

Oh, and as for the partitioning business, I only had 1 OS installed at a time. I installed 10.2, and that didn't work, so I tried 10.1, and that didn't work, so I tried server 10.2, and that didn't work, and now I'm trying 10.2 again...

-Aran Crowe

Moonray · Oct 23, 2003, 11:26 AM

Try twice to boot from a OS8/9 CD to get the open firmware resetted. Then make sure your OS X HD is 'master' on one of the IDE buses and correctly jumpered.

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