[sek929]

Hey everyone, I gots me a problem here.

My dad's Mac is a B&W G3 300. He's been running Panther for a while now and using Firefox as his main browser...which is painfully slow. I found Safari 3 to be worlds faster at rendering pages on my old Mac so I decided to do a little upgrading to get my dad a little more speed in his aging machine.

He's only got 448MB of RAM, enough to run Tiger, but not by much. My first mistake was ordering a 512MB PC-100 chip. Although the max RAM for the first B&W was 1GB, it has to be in 4 separate 256MB chips. I installed the RAM and it only saw half of it. So now he has 702MB of RAM, close enough for me.

After the Tiger installation failed for the 4th time I decided the installer didn't like the RAM, something I've heard about many times. Most people say that after installing they were able to go on using the RAM anyways. So I removed the stick, installed Tiger (went fine this time) and booted up to install all the updates. Updated to 10.4.11, got Safari 3 set up (which was easily twice as quick at rendering pages than Firefox was) and shut the computer down to re-install the RAM.

Booted up fine, everything was snappy™, until.... My dad hollers to me that Safari crashed and the computer is frozen. I hit the reset button, computer starts to boot, gets to the Apple screen.....stays at the Apple screen for a good 3 minutes, then the screen changes to aqua blue with the cursor visible and movable, then nothing. I removed RAM chip, repeat process, still the same thing.

Reset the PRAM, nothing. Reset the CUDA, nothing. Decide to deal with it the next day.

Boot off the Tiger installation CD and run Startup disk. Only the Tiger disk and network startup are available, not the HD named "DEERE"

Run Disk Utility and repair volume "DEERE" first thing comes up red "Invalid Volume Header" repair runs fine and completes. Still nothing.

Here is disk utility where "DEERE" is grayed out:


Says "DEERE" is not mounted:


Mount option is available but nothing happens when I click it, tried multiple times


Also heres the info pane for "DEERE" in disk utility.


I have no idea what to do short of re-installing Tiger again, any ideas?

[ibook_steve]

You can try reinstalling, but the disk is probably dead. And a 6 GB disk really is not enough for Tiger. Hopefully you had a backup. You can try putting the disk in an external case to see if you can extract anything off of it.

Steve

[sek929]

Originally Posted by ibook_steve 

You can try reinstalling, but the disk is probably dead. And a 6 GB disk really is not enough for Tiger. Hopefully you had a backup. You can try putting the disk in an external case to see if you can extract anything off of it.

Steve

Tell me about it, I kinda forgot how little space these old machines had when I started this process. Resulting in deleting as much unnecessary stuff as I could off the drive and installing the bare minimum for Tiger.

Hopefully it'll work long enough for a re-install and then a copy of all his important files (mostly digital photos) over the network to my machine.

Could my monkey business have put it over the edge? Or was it just a coincidence with a really old HDD?

[sek929]

Ugh, can't even re-install, no disk to install on to.

Looks like my G4 will have to come to the rescue and hopefully recover some data off the drive...why the hell didn't I back up first...I know better than that.

[sek929]

Update:

Dropped the 6GB drive in my G4 and it read just fine. I am going to backup all the data to both my G4 and iMac.

What's the ruling here, try to get the G3 working again, or set my dad up with the G4 and call it a day?

[jmiddel]

Well, that really depends on your finances. If you can afford to give your dad the G4, it will be a better experience for him, no doubt, but with a slightly bigger drive the G3 can work well, my wife uses a iBook G3, albeit with 700 MHZ and it does web surfing and word processing just fine. Surfing both with Safari and FF, and she only has 640 MB of RAM, which is pitiful. You could get another 256 chip to substitute for the 64 you have, one Gig does make a difference from 702K and might compensate a bit for the slow cpu. How much $ is the memory? Oh, and BTW, would you have to share the G4 with your dad? I definitively dis-recommend that

[sek929]

Well, I have an iMac now, I was going to set the G4 as a time machine drive, but maybe not now....