trying to upgrade my g3

I have an imac g3 tray load, 333mhz lime color. Theres no os on it and I would like to get it running on 10.3. Where do I begin? Well I have a 120gb hard drive that I bought brand new as opposed to the 6 gb that was originally in it. I wanna max out the memory, but for now I just wanna get the darn thing running... Pleas help

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Well first up what operating system is it currently running? They came with Classic OS 8, and require OS 9 in order to upgrade the firmware prior to installing any version of OS X. Trust you are pretty conversant with working inside a computer as G3 can be difficult to crack and change hard drive's in.

When you get the drive in, OS 9 installed, firmware updated as below link, then look for the Panther OS X.3 CD set which may be difficult as Panther was the first OS to be released on DVDs from memory. Make sure you purchase a black retail install set and not some silver grey discs which were supplied with another machine.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1395

Do not attempt to install OS X without downloading and installing the firmware update Document No.60384, third from the bottom on the first section of the link.

Also for your model 512MB is the maximum memory so do not expect too much from the machine.

Slight correction. Tiger was the first OSX on a single DVD. All Retail panthers I own and have worked with were on 3 CD's.

I own a Grape 333. Mine already had the Firmware upgraded so I just slapped Panther on it with no issues.

There is an issue with the tray load G3's and large drives above 8GB. I will find the URL but remember you having to make an 8GB Boot partition and install OSX there then partition the rest of the drive for a data drive. Will find the URL and post here.


Here you go:

Mac OS X

If you have a hard drive over 8 GB in size, you must partition it or you will not be able to install Mac OS X. If you are creating the partition within OS X, it must be smaller than 7.4 GB as reported by Disk Utility (because sometimes a GB is billion bytes and sometimes it's 1,073,741,824 bytes); we suggest simply setting it at 7 GB to avoid having to redo the whole installation if the partition ends up bigger than specified (it happens). Mac OS X must be completely within the first 8 GB of space on your hard drive or you will not be able to run OS X.

http://www.lowendmac.com/imacs/rev-d-imac-g3-333-mhz.html

I am very good with the hardware part but this being my first mac, its like trying to read chineese. The last os that was on my mac was 8.6. Another problem im having is the tray load is not a dvd rom, its only cd rom. Is it possible to stic a dvd rom drive thats a slot load int my machine without haviing to replace the logic board? Another question I have is I have a burned copy of 9.1 thatt worked perfectly fine on my friends computer butt mine wont read it. I also do not have a fire wire so what other way can I reboot