Okay Imac G3 arrived..

Hey guys just thought I'd let you know that my Imac G3 arrived yesturday.



Anyway hooked it up, got it booting, took about at least 42 minutes to get to the desktop - So somethings not quite right with it.(Me thinks hard drive is either dieing or just slow or could be the processor - Didn't realize the processor was that slow!) I just emailed my friend about it, and he said could be numerous of things. He said he did have trouble with Mac OS X 10 when he installed, but he did tell me that Mac OS 9 was also installed.

So I tried to do the command where it allows to select a boot device or something? (forgive my mac knowledge is relatively poor at the moment!) However the keyboard that he shipped with it is not actually recognised by the Mac Firmware until after Mac OS X boots. (and I only managed to get it boot into OS X once as stated) - Therefore I couldn't use the apple command.

However when I booted it up a few hours later after having a break, it did something really strange, it went straight into the firmware command screen or something after 10 minutes trying to load the OS. Something about a stop message setup. I typed in Mac-boot and it loaded for a bit and then got a mac with a question mark (?) flashing on the screen.

So somewhere along the line I must have mucked something up while I was in the OS itself.

The only thing I did was create a new user account for me to use, so I didn't have to keep booting in the administrator account and changed the desktop background and just had a look at the mac help stuff on the OS. I was only in it for a half an hour or so before I turned it off.


What are your thoughts? Did I unwittingly do something while I was in the perference panel? Have I fried something?

I'm not stressing, it's actually quite challenging to figure out why Mac OS X won't boot up and I actually quite enjoying trying to figuring it out, however I'm quite at a stump.


I know it could be a number of things? But I wonder what I did to stuff it up completely?

You're supposed to hold the option key. That's why that earlier problem happened.

They keyboard is a non apple. So what key would I need to press on a PC USB Windows keyboard?

Alt.

Oh lol...I didn't know I was told to hold the X key and the Windows key But would that work on a non apple keyboard though?

So I just need to press ALT and that's it? I can't remember what it was now Alt+ X?

No X. Just ALT, and when it finishes processing, it should give you 2 little pictures of hard drives, and it should say OS X on one and OS 9 below the other. Try booting OS 9.

Okay according to the bootup thing there is only the Mac OS X and no Mac 0S 9. So I think my friend was clearly mistaken.

Well after about 10 minutes - I'm in Mac OS X ! Wohoo!

Now will be able to use my USB thumb drive? As I need to transfer a few wallpaper photos over to the mac? I think I just have to take the keyboard out of one of the usb plugs.

Me thinks it would be better you got that iBook back in shape before thinking of adding desktop images. Did you get any of the install disks with it?

No 1 it's an Imac lol

No 2 I'm getting the Mac OS cd's sent to me. Got that all organised this afternoon. As I explained to my mate what's going on with it, so he said he'll send me the discs to give it a clean. I hope it's Mac 0S 9 because the way I see it is that this machine can't handle OS X 10.2 well at all lol

Well i i i i i i i i i iMac. Gotcha. Yeah it might be best and easier for you to reinstall everything instead of trying to sort out the mess already in it. Let us know how it goes!

Hey no worries , judging from researhing on the net, what would be much better to use on the imac? Mac OS 10.2 or Mac OS 9? And installation shouldn't be relatively hard as long as I follow the instructions? And to boot form the CD...do I press alt and? (since I don't have a mac keyboard lol)

OS X running on a PPC of less than 500mhz will put some strain on the system, especially if it has less than 512mb ram.

how fast is the processor? how much ram has it got? how much hard drive space?

ShadowDan said:

Hey no worries , judging from researhing on the net, what would be much better to use on the imac? Mac OS 10.2 or Mac OS 9? And installation shouldn't be relatively hard as long as I follow the instructions? And to boot form the CD...do I press alt and? (since I don't have a mac keyboard lol)

Click to expand...

To startup from the install disk, you simply press the C key and you will be guided for the install. If possible, you might be better off installing 10.2 than installing OS 9 because you will find it difficult to get apps that still work in OS 9 nowadays.

But to me, the best possible solution in your case would be to find on eBay or something a full retail install CD kit of Mac OS X Panther 10.3.x (I personally would not install Tiger - 10.4.x - on that machine of yours, it would lag a bit too much). Panther is still a very contemporary OS, and it was very much more stable than Jaguar - 10.2.x - ever was.

And do add the most RAM you can afford. You'll be happier.

Kool thanks for the advice guys . Either way, I think I might just stick with Mac OS 9 though it probably run better then Mac OS 10. With only 350MH and 256MB of ram and not upgrading at this time) I personally don't see how it will run Mac OS 10.3. As I said I'm not looking at to do anything fancy except maybe use the net and try and run Office on it.

I'll be honest once it does boot up Mac OS 10.2 runs fine, I think actually loading it is the problem from boot up, Which I think could be a hard ware problem, maybe hard drive lol. I thought of this before but I didn't really think of testing anything out.