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lothar56 · Aug 19, 2005, 12:55 PM

ve got a G3/266 Tower (400MHz processor, 512 MB, 6GB+2GB). It worked pretty much perfectly in OS X up until i moved to college. Now I see the apple and the spinning thing, but then the screen flashes once and doesn't start up. I fiddled for a while and now it doesn't start up at all. There's not startup tone and but I can hear the hard drive spinning up. I had it overclocked to 450 but brought it down to 400 and that's when nothing worked. I can unhook both hard drives and start up from an OS 9 CD but I can't start up from any OS X cd or anything. I tried the reset button on the motherboard and zapping the PRAM but nothing helped. Any ideas?

kick52 · Aug 19, 2005, 01:07 PM

it works without the os x hard drive, right.

if so, the hard drive (with os x) must be broken. you should try calling apple.

kick52 · Aug 19, 2005, 01:17 PM

it works without the os x hard drive, right.

if so, the hard drive (with os x) must be broken. you should try calling apple.

if your lucky, its the HD, if your not, it might be the logic board.

what do you mean by not starting up? does it start running? does the computer start but not run an operating system?

it is probably one of the HDs.

good luck

Millennium · Aug 19, 2005, 01:56 PM

I had a G3 Desktop for a while, and I noticed that sometimes it would stop recognizing the internal ATA bus temporarily. Do you have an external hard drive or internal SCSI drive, that you could use temporarily? Your machine should still be able to boot from these. You may not be able to use the CD-ROM drive, though.

I never was able to figure out exactly what caused the machine to stop recognizing the bus, but towards the end I generally had good luck getting it to work again by powering it down completely, unplugging it and letting it sit for a few minutes, and then plugging it back in and trying again. As a last resort, you could try this along with removing the motherboard battery, though make sure to put it back in before you start up again.

Millennium · Aug 19, 2005, 01:58 PM

The other thing you could try is to boot while holding Cmd-Opt-O-F to bring up the Open Firmware prompt. Once there, type "set-defaults" and "reset-all" (no quotes in either case, but otherwise do them just like I typed them). This is sort of a last resort, but it should help.

lothar56 · Aug 19, 2005, 08:59 PM

Okay what I did was go back to the monitor I had used before and what was happening is it would switch to a resolution my little monitor would not support so it would go black. But now for some reason it won't start up unless there's a monitor plugged in first. I have no idea...

NeilCharter · Aug 20, 2005, 11:06 AM

Try these:

1. Can you boot up using a OS X CD? Sometimes OS X can be fussier about the processor.

2. Restart with your monitor plugged in and HOLD DOWN SHIFT. This apparently boots using standard settings and your monitor should work. Then you can either change the settings to what works best for the monitor and restart OR trash the display prefs and restart again. Can't remember which one worked.

3. Check your hard drive connections and if you can boot up from the OS X CD then run the disk utility to see if the drive needs repairing. I had a 60 gig drive that worked great until it suddenly died without any warning. Luckily I was able to get most of the information of it.

Good luck