[marusin]

Hey all,

I've searched the forums and haven't found anyone else with this problem...

I have a B&W G3 400 that I've been running Jaguar on with no problems. I bought a brand new Maxtor 120gb hard drive and have been trying to install Panther on this new drive (I've removed the original drive and am just going to use this 120gb drive for now) but have had no luck. The harddrive is formatted for OS X with Journaling Enabled.

I make it all the way thru the first install cd with no problem. It prompts to restart the computer (or it will restart itself in 30 seconds). Once the computer restarts, I get the typical Grey start-up screen, but then get the black box that says I need to restart my computer.

I restart numerous times and keep getting this same Restart Message (I believe this is the "nice way" of showing a Kernel Panic)? I've tried zapping the PRAM and have tried the install numerous times and still cannot get past disc 1 of install. I do not have any cards in the slots other than my default video card. I haven't tried installing Jaguar yet on this new drive and trying to upgrade to Panther from there (don't know if this would be any different). Just wondering if anyone has any tips on installing Panther onto this brand new drive.

Thanks!

[gorickey]

Try re-formatting and installing from Disc 1 again...maybe it was a bad install?

[Spheric Harlot]

Disconnect all non-standard peripherals, and if you have weird expansion cards installed, remove them.

They may be incompatible with Panther or require driver updates.

Also, you can try holding down Command (Apple) + V at restart for verbose mode. This is the exact same startup procedure, except that it dumps the console to the screen (usually hidden behind the pretty startup screens). Watching the messages that appear can be very helpful, especially the last few messages before your kernel panic appears.

Note also that Panther is rather pickier about third-party RAM than Jaguar was, so you might try removing extra RAM; see if that helps.

-s*

[marusin]

Well, I took out all of the memory other than an original 128mb stick (original though to an old iMac of mine though.. I didn't get any memory with this machine when i got it a couple years ago).

The install went on the first disc all the way until the end where the screen flipped to blue and the spinning wheel showed up and it just hung there (I didn't get to the "Your computer will restart in 30 seconds message"? It just hung there and continued to sit there for the hour+ I left it. I'm going to retry again and then if I still have no luck I am going to try installing Jaguar on this drive and go from there (maybe an upgrade will work)?

I never realized this was going to be such a pain to install on this machine. I upgraded my iBook to Panther with no problems.

[NeilCharter]

Your problem could lie with the hard drive, since you've used the install disks successfully with another mac.

If you can, put the old drive back in and install on that.

B&W have funky hard drive controllers. I had a problem adding another drive into the machine. I can't remember whether even a single larger drive will fail when installing OS X.

My solution in the end was to add in another ATA controller card - this allowed me to have 2 drives and install OS X onto the larger drive.

If this is the problem, its something that has existing since the B&W first shipped. The controller is the issue and was changed with the RevB model. Apple never really fessed up to this one and of course by the time that people started seeing a problem their machines were out of warranty!

Hope this helps

Neil

[Detrius]

I have a B&W G3 that I use at work that kernel panics every boot unless I use either single-user mode or verbose mode. It's quite odd. Booting in verbose mode results in no kernel panic. It's odd, but once it's up, it works great.

[tooki]

I agree... if it's a rev A machine, then the internal IDE controller won't play nice with any modern hard drive.

An IDE controller card is the only solution, since blue and white G3s can't boot from FireWire.

tooki

[dreilly1]

Originally posted by tooki:
I agree... if it's a rev A machine, then the internal IDE controller won't play nice with any modern hard drive.

An IDE controller card is the only solution, since blue and white G3s can't boot from FireWire.

tooki

Or, you can put the new drive inside a firewire case and keep the internal drive for the OS, while using the external drive for apps and data. They can't boot from an external Firewire drive, but they can still use it!

I installed Panther on my "Smurfy" Rev A B&W G3 with no problems. It had the stock hard drive in it (12 GB, I think). It functions well as my print and backup server, and financial tracker.

A few years back, I tried replacing the drive with a new one, and failed miserably.

[marusin]

Is it possible to setup this new drive as a secondary drive within my Mac (rather than using it as the master drive that I'm booting from) by chaining it to the master or am I going to still run into these limitations?

I don't really want any external devices plugged into this machine/nor do I want to spend $100 on a controller card (I'm cheap, I Know!)

Thanks for the help!

Originally posted by dreilly1:
Or, you can put the new drive inside a firewire case and keep the internal drive for the OS, while using the external drive for apps and data. They can't boot from an external Firewire drive, but they can still use it!

[dreilly1]

Originally posted by marusin:
Is it possible to setup this new drive as a secondary drive within my Mac (rather than using it as the master drive that I'm booting from) by chaining it to the master or am I going to still run into these limitations?

IF you do have a Rev. A motherboard, no. The IDE controller is FUBAR'd. It can only take one drive, and is picky about the drive it takes. Nothing you can do but get more hardware.

Go to www.lowendmac.com for some more information. Much of the information there will be a few years old since the machine itself is so old, but the details should still be relevant.

[NeilCharter]

The cheapest option really is to use another ATA controller. Have a look at OWC - I find they are very competative and understand Macs:

http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Pa...lers&Template=

There was one card for 67 bucks.

Looking at external drives, the prices have come down quite a lot:

http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Pa...le=&Template=1

[DominikHoffmann]

I'm in the same boat. I have a B&W G3 that won't allow me to reliably use a third-party 40 GB IDE hard drive. I decided to go the route of using a PCI-based UltraATA controller card, as well. Will I be able to boot from that drive?

Dominik Hoffmann

[Cadaver]

This makes sense.

I've got my sister's discarded rev. 1 B&W G3/350 that I'm refitting to use at the office. I added an extra 256MB of RAM (576MB total now), an OWC 900MHz G3 ZIF upgrade, a Sony CDRW (pulled from a PC of mine) to replace the original DVD-ROM, and swapped out the original Rage 128 for a Radeon Mac Edition left over from another machine (mainly for DVI support).

I also bought a 60GB, 8MB cache, 7200rpm drive to replace the original 6GB drive. The machine would crash while attemping to install Panther. After excluding RAM and the new CPU as the culprit, I thought perhaps the drive was dead. I sucessfully installed Panther on an older 20GB drive, but really wanted a faster 60GB in there. Makes sense the dodgy rev. 1 IDE controller would be the culprit.

Just ordered an Acard PCI ATA controller from OWC, though I do hate having to spend more on what is essentially a spare computer. But since I've already commited this much, what's another c-note?

This brings me to about $430 total spent on this machine to modernize it, not including loads of spare parts I had lying around. Not bad I suppose since the Mac was free to begin with. However, for what I'll use it for (light graphics, MS Office, web/email, network file management) it still outperforms the PC I currently have at the office. Can't wait to get a Mac back in there.

Just for fun, it's final specs will be:
-900MHz G3, integral 512K cache @ 900MHz
-32MB Radeon Mac Edition in 66MHz slot
-60GB HD w/ 8MB cache (OS, apps, data)
-20GB HD (data, backups, misc. garbage)
-ACard dual-channel PCI ATA/133 controller
-576MB PC-100 RAM
-Sony 40x/24x/10x CDRW
-Apple 17" LCD Studio Display
-Apple Pro keyboard
-Logitech optical wheel mouse
-MacOS X 10.3.2 (with PCI/Quartz Extreme hack)
-Dazzle USB multi-format flash card reader