Ye olde G3 OS 8.5

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Hi All,

I've been given an old G3 PowerBook. The PowerBook itself has had very little use, but before the previous owner got rid of it they cleared everything off it (including, I think, the operating system).

I have the 8.5 OS system CD and can boot it up from the CD, but there is no destination drive for the OS to be loaded onto. There is definately a hard disk (4G) installed, but the machine cannot see it.

I'm not a complete techno monkey but I'm more used to OS X and am struggling to figure out what's going on. I've tried using the disk utility on the installation CD but it can't see the drive either.

Any ideas, hints or tips?

Thanks,
J
 
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Hard dics setup in 8.5 should find an IDE drive, If it finds nothing the hard drive is either unpluged, or crashed. How old is this powerbook? A model number would be helpful.
 
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J
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On the bottom of the laptop "PowerBook G3 Series -
14.1TFT/226MHz-1MB/64MB/4GB HD/4MB video/CD/Modem"

Everything on it seems to be dated 1998 the hard drive is plugged in, I've taken it out and made sure it was correctly installed. I know it hasn't been used for at least 3 years.

Is there any way of testing the hard drive?
 
M

MacHeadCase

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Welcome to Mac-Forums, jonweb!

That would be on the CDs that originally came with the PowerBook. There should be somewhere on the OS Install disk Disk Utility.

There might even be a Hardware Test: I can't remember if the Hardware Test was around back then. I would think so but am not positive. If you have both of them run Disk Utility first as this will repair the hard drive (if it is possible to fix it) and then, Hardware Test is for checking all the other hardware components in the machine. So run it in Extended Mode.

You do know how to boot from a CD, right? Insert the CD and restart, holding down the C key.

Good luck with this! Report back to us what happened then. :girl:
 
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J
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Hi & thanks

There's a drive setup in one of the utilities that the help recommends you try to test the disk for errors, but it can't find the disk! Which ever of the utilities I play about with it cannot see the disk.

So it may be that it's a hardware and not software issue as I'd hoped and the hard disk is no more. And it seems that there may be bo way for me to test for that.

Thanks for your help though :)
 
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MacHeadCase

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Hah! Just googled and it just shows up to which point I'd forgotten all about the pre-Mac OS X days! Yes, the utility to check out the hard drive was called back then Disk First Aid. Can you find this one?

I believe Drive Setup was to erase/reformat the hard drive...
 
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J
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Yeah tried that one too. Still couldn't find the disk. I also tried my Hardware Test disk that came with my G4 but that wouldn't do anything.

I also took at the hard drive just to check it was installed correctly and it seemed ok. Looks like it's kaput.

Thanks.
 
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Your laptop has an IDE hard drive,you will need a version of Hard drive set up that will find an IDE drive,if nothing finds it,its crashed.
 

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