02-09-2004, 12:05 AM

hello all...

am having problems installing osx on a beige g3 desktop system. was able to successfully install a while back and then hard drive crashed. finally found replacement 8gb harddrive to install on.

have harddrive set as slave and cd drive set as master on same channel. when i turn mac on, get little floppy disk in the middle of screen w/ a blinking question mark. not sure what this means exactly. any result other than this that i am getting is a black screen.

1st off.. not sure if all is connected properly. from what i have read, bleieve it to be.
2nd: not sure which is primary ide channel. in upper left of motherboard see
SCSI
IDE?
IDE?

again, am not sure which one is primary.

any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
thanks in advance as i am a newbie to the whole mac experience and definitely want to learn to learn this as i am tired and way to used to working on pc's

thanks again

02-09-2004, 09:26 AM

If you are replacing your original drive, you should set the jumper settings the same on the new drive. (which I thought was Master).

Have you already formatted this drive for a Mac?

02-09-2004, 04:53 PM

I installed OS X on my old beige G3 as well but I also added an 80GB drive to it. As I remember you needed to partition the drive to install OS X and the smallest partition had to be something like 4GB. I have no idea why and it's pretty weird but then again - the beige G3 is the oldest Mac to officialy support OS X. Keep us posted on your process or issues.

02-09-2004, 05:14 PM

Originally Posted by dziner

I installed OS X on my old beige G3 as well but I also added an 80GB drive to it. As I remember you needed to partition the drive to install OS X and the smallest partition had to be something like 4GB. I have no idea why and it's pretty weird but then again - the beige G3 is the oldest Mac to officialy support OS X. Keep us posted on your process or issues.

OS X will install on the 8GB drive, but that is the maximum size. Anything larger has to be partitioned. Also, OS X has to reside in the first 8GB.

02-12-2004, 10:33 AM

Thanks for the response guys.

The drive is an 8GB drive and having done this once before I remeber OSX actually let me partition the drive which @ the time was over 8GB. My problem is not being sure how to set the jumpers on both drives and which of the IDE channels is primary IDE.

This is a fresh install of OSX on an 8GB drive. Finally set cd drive to primary and harddrive to secondary and pc boots up.. however get floppy disk w/ blinking question mark inside.

Anyone know if the harddrive needs to be formatted to instal OSX or can I takea drive w/ win2k on it and OS X will format?? Please advise..

Will see what happens. Thanks for the insight.