EffingController
Member
Hi all! I've been having some strange issues with a 266 MHZ beige desktop G3 I recently bought. It had a bad power supply so it is using a modern ATX power supply with the motherboard jumper switched over. It also didn't have a hard drive with it when I got it so I gave it a 40GB hard drive along with its existing CDROM drive.
The main problem is that I can't get it to boot into an OS. I've burned several different OS installation disks (8.0.7, 8.6, and 9.2.2). For each disk, the CDROM will spin up, it will give me a Happy Mac, and after about 10 or 15 seconds, it sounds like it's struggling to read and switches to the flashing question mark icon, and then it spits out the CD. I've swapped in another CDROM drive from another G3 and it does the same thing.
The machine also came with two PCI cards: an Ethernet card (for 100Base-T), and a USB/Firewire card. Weirdly, if I remove the USB card, the machine won't power on at all. The keyboard lights will flash if I try to do it using the keyboard, but there's no life beyond that. It will do this even if it's in another slot. Removing the Ethernet card has no effect. Of course, this could be entirely unrelated to the drive issue. I don't have a problem with either card being in the machine, but I do find the effect of the USB card's absence to be interesting!
Beyond the card swapping, I have tried the following:
Where else should I go from here? Any ideas, help, encouragement, and mild verbal abuse are greatly appreciated!
The main problem is that I can't get it to boot into an OS. I've burned several different OS installation disks (8.0.7, 8.6, and 9.2.2). For each disk, the CDROM will spin up, it will give me a Happy Mac, and after about 10 or 15 seconds, it sounds like it's struggling to read and switches to the flashing question mark icon, and then it spits out the CD. I've swapped in another CDROM drive from another G3 and it does the same thing.
The machine also came with two PCI cards: an Ethernet card (for 100Base-T), and a USB/Firewire card. Weirdly, if I remove the USB card, the machine won't power on at all. The keyboard lights will flash if I try to do it using the keyboard, but there's no life beyond that. It will do this even if it's in another slot. Removing the Ethernet card has no effect. Of course, this could be entirely unrelated to the drive issue. I don't have a problem with either card being in the machine, but I do find the effect of the USB card's absence to be interesting!
Beyond the card swapping, I have tried the following:
- Reseating the voltage regulator
- Replacing the batter and zapping the PRAM
- Using different IDE ribbons
- Using a different hard drive from another G3
- Removing/swapping some of the added memory sticks it came with
Where else should I go from here? Any ideas, help, encouragement, and mild verbal abuse are greatly appreciated!