Powermac G3 Revision 2 shows ? file at startup

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Apr 25, 2007
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My girlfriends dad got a B&W G3. He doesn't have a lot of money and doesn't know a lot about computers. He wants something to surf the net. He can't get it started I decided to take it and work on it.

I do not own a mac, but I build my own PC's. I at least have more chances of me getting to work than him.

He gave me the tower, keyboard and mouse and a MAC OS8 CD. The machine has 512 megs of 100mhz RAM in it, not sure about the hard drive, a DVD ROM and everything appears to turn on, and "work" He said he took his imac harddrive and put it in the G3 tower, because it didn't have a harddrive.

I have tried turning it on and letting it boot, and I have tired booting to the MAC OS8 disk.

Both times all I get is the grey screen with the ? file that switches to the happy mac logo then back to ?

I have tired booting pressing option key, C with the disk in there, and the 4 key startup. Nothing works to get this thing off of the ? start.

I hooked up new CDROM and it still failed. I tried an imac disk and it too failed.

So I believe a couple of things, it could be the MAC OS8 disk, which I read the machine says it should run a minimum of MAC OS 8.5. Is this a possible issue, or should the machine at least boot to the disk, or boot to the option screen so I can tell it to do something?

It could be the ATA ribbon that goes from the CDROM/DVD to the board. It could be the board. However wouldn't I still be able to get to the option screen if I boot pressing option.

It could be the keyboard, I do not have another USB keyboard, so I am not sure if this is it, but the power button on it tunrs on and off the keyboard so I am not sure if that is it either.

Does anyone have any other suggestions?

Thank you.

Edit: So I should have searched, I just found another post talking about swapping an imac hd into a powermac and getting the same issue and talking about jumpers, I will try that tonight, but a lot of my questions still stand. If anyone wants to take a crack at them, thank you.
 

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