B&W G3 (Rev 2) Tiger Woes, Possible RAM Fault?

[CD5150]

Hello, I've been having issues with my B&W Power Macintosh G3 Rev. 2. It's a 400mhz unit that has it's CPU overclocked to 450mhz. I installed Tiger 10.4.6 from DVD to a 128GB SSD (connected to a flashed Sil3112 SATA PCI card). The first half of the SSD is for OS 9 and the other half is for OS X. I got past the initial setup, but after launching Apple System Profiler, and checking all the hardware specs, the system kernel panicked. It didn't spit out the log info; it just gave me the generic "You need to restart your computer message". This happens seemingly at random, and it's not the first time that this has happened. At one time, I was updating the G3 to 10.4.11 and it does the same kernel panic that I just experienced, bricking that OS X install. Rev 1 B&W's (the ones with a faulty IDE controller) are known to be picky with memory, and I have maxed out the RAM at 1GB. Mac OS 9.2.2 (the universal disc from MacOS9Lives) is stable. Could the RAM be at fault even on a Rev 2 board? Does the SATA card have to be in a specifc PCI slot? Defective drive cable(s)?

 

[GRudolf94]

It could be faulty/dirty RAM. It could be the overclock. It could be a genuine hardware failure.
Knock the machine down to 400MHz and see what happens. Run it on a single RAM stick, if you have more than one. If still troublesome, see, if possible, if it works off the onboard ATA controller.

 

[Byrd]

Was the overclock a recent change? B&W all revisions are picky about RAM, especially as you max it out.

 

[Phipli]

OSX booting is a lot more work than OS9. It isn't unusual for an overclock to seem OK in Mac OS 9 but result in OSX crashes.

 

[CD5150]

Was the overclock a recent change? B&W all revisions are picky about RAM, especially as you max it out.

It's been overclocked @ 450mhz for months. No issues as far as I remember, until now.

 

[CD5150]

OK, after cleaning the RAM modules and the RAM slots, it seems to be fine right now. Will post updates if anything else changes.

 

[joevt]

My Rev 1 B&W G3 has 768 MB of RAM. If I ever upgraded it to 1 GB then that 256 MB stick is lying around here somewhere.
It has a 1 GHz G4 upgrade so the bus is at 66 MHz instead of 100 MHz. I don't remember if I had 1 GB before or after this CPU upgrade. I should try to find the receipts.

 

[CD5150]

Ok it was still crashing, albeit not quite as often. I set the CPU from the 450mhz overclock I had back to 400mhz and it's all fixed now.