[sek929]

*Alert! Obsolete hardware discussion*

Ordered a B&W G3 400 from PowerMax and it arrived today. It was pre-installed with OS9 so I was going to wipe the HD clean and install Tiger anyways.

I boot it up for the first time and I get the Finder folder/question mark blinky dealy. Ok, so it can't find the System Folder....happened all the time on my older Macs.

I dust of my old OS 9 restor disks and boot the G3 that way. Starts up okay....but no HD appears on the desktop...hmm

I then go into control panels (BTW, I completely forgot where EVERYTHING is in OS9) and launch Startup Disk....still only the restore CD is listed and it cannot find any other valid System Folder.

Lastly, I launched Drive Setup utility only to find that the HDD lists as "not supported" and therefore cannot be initialized. Interesting....

After opening the case I notice immediately that the HDD isn't ATA, but a SCSI drive attached to a SCSI card in the Mac. The drive itself is a Seagate Cheetah SCSI drive that actually says Apple Computer on it. I never really mucked around with SCSI before, and I wasn't even aware that this particular machine shipped with it either.

I've already contacted PowerMax, but it took several days for her to get back to me last time (when the Cube I had ordered was no longer there).

Any ideas? I'll be bringing the Mac back home with me today to play with it a little....but I am very nervous about the whole SCSI card and SCSI drive thing.

[DrBoar]

Old computer can start to display various odd behaviours if the pram battery is going flat. Som of the old SCSI cards are not OS X supported. If you do not have a old IDE disk around go to a second hand computer store the slavation army store or similar and buy a dirt cheap pentium II or III computer.That will have both a decent IDE disk and some extra PC100 memory sticks that you can use as well!

[sek929]

The SCSI card, as I found out, was a BTO option from Apple. Others have gotten X on it (Rev 2 motherboard) and it already has an assload of RAM for an old machine.

The tech replied and also mentioned the PRAM battery, which I am going to pick up today. It should have been obvious now that I think about it.

Thank for the reply!

Side note: The computer originally came with two 9 GB SCSI drives set up in RAID, but only one of the drives remain.

[sek929]

PRAM battery fixed everything. Now the G3 400 is running 10.4.11 on 768 MB RAM with a nice new widescreen LCD.

Actually, I'm posting from it right now.

Already sh!tcanned the puck mouse, and I'm ordering a Pro keyboard to replace this tiny little number.

My grandfather is going to stylin'!

[Langdon]

You bought and paid for a somewhat overpriced computer from them and they didn't even replace the PRAM battery as part of a refub?

Nice. Remind me never to shop at powermax.

[BLAZE_MkIV]

So there were two drives formatted for raid and you removed one and expected the drive to mount?

If you have one and 10.0 or 10.1 disk should work to format it. If its an apple labeled drive Disk Utility should format it. Otherwise LaCie Silverlining Pro 6.4.9 software download - Mac OS - VersionTracker

[sek929]

The original label for the computer reads as follows.

9GBx2 UWSC W Raid. It only came with one 9 GB drive and I've already installed Tiger on it and everything works fine. I'd imagine the single drive is no longer RAID.