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Beige G3 Startup and Disk Read Problems

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:
  • 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!
 

ried

Well-known member
Hard drive jumpers and CD-ROM set to the proper Master / Slave configuration? Do these have a CUDA switch to reset after making a hardware change?
 

MacKilRoy

Well-known member
I’ve actually had to recap a beige G3 board that wasn’t working properly prior to recap. The caps had leakage that was visible under them and corrosion was already affecting pads. Not saying it’s the magical cure but it’s entirely possible a cap is leaking and bridging something.

Having said that, I’ve also had a G3 beige be troublesome to boot. Took me several hours to finally get it to boot reliably, combinations of remove and restore the battery, holding command option PR as well as resetting CUDA. Then I swapped my personality card with a spare and it booted right up.

Check your personality card. I found that Mac OS 8.1 isn’t as fussy over a missing/damaged personality card and anything above will refuse to boot or will crash attempting to boot.
 
I’ve actually had to recap a beige G3 board that wasn’t working properly prior to recap. The caps had leakage that was visible under them and corrosion was already affecting pads. Not saying it’s the magical cure but it’s entirely possible a cap is leaking and bridging something.

Having said that, I’ve also had a G3 beige be troublesome to boot. Took me several hours to finally get it to boot reliably, combinations of remove and restore the battery, holding command option PR as well as resetting CUDA. Then I swapped my personality card with a spare and it booted right up.

Check your personality card. I found that Mac OS 8.1 isn’t as fussy over a missing/damaged personality card and anything above will refuse to boot or will crash attempting to boot.
Unfortunately, a CUDA reset didn't do the trick. I swapped in a personality card from a G3 AIO but the outcome was the same, although the board didn't seem to mind the absence of its precious USB PCI card. A superficial inspection of the board didn't show any obvious capacitor issues, but I think recapping is the next move at this point.
 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
Early Beige G3's were master ONLY (1 drive per cable).

Are you using retail CD images or machine specific ones? There was a universal OS 9.2.2 ISO floating around the net, retail CDs ended at 9.2.1 I think.

There should be an internal 50 pin SCSI header on the motherboard near the external 25 pin one if you have a good SCSI drive and want to test that instead of IDE.
 
Early Beige G3's were master ONLY (1 drive per cable).

Are you using retail CD images or machine specific ones? There was a universal OS 9.2.2 ISO floating around the net, retail CDs ended at 9.2.1 I think.

There should be an internal 50 pin SCSI header on the motherboard near the external 25 pin one if you have a good SCSI drive and want to test that instead of IDE.
Yeah, the ribbons I'm using are one drive per cable, so the master-slave jumpers shouldn't have an effect (although they're both set to master). I'm using images off of the Garden, including the 9.2.2 version. I don't have a SCSI drive to test with, unfortunately; if this is an issue with the IDE controller (my best guess right now), that might help to prove it.
 

macuserman

Well-known member
Yeah, the ribbons I'm using are one drive per cable, so the master-slave jumpers shouldn't have an effect (although they're both set to master). I'm using images off of the Garden, including the 9.2.2 version. I don't have a SCSI drive to test with, unfortunately; if this is an issue with the IDE controller (my best guess right now), that might help to prove it.
You could also try a PCI card that is IDE or ATA or a sata if you could find one to try and bypass the onboard controllers
 

CircuitBored

Well-known member
Ah, beige G3s are fun.

Firstly, clean it. You don't necessarily have to wash the entire logic board but you should at least use some contact cleaner on all the slots and connectors, including the PCI and personality card slots. Remove the ROM SIMM and clean the pins. I've noticed that PowerMacs from the mid-late 90s tend to have oxidisation on their connectors and early G3s definitely suffer from this issue.

Does your logic board still have the "WARRANTY VOID IF REMOVED" sticker intact? If not, check that the CPU/bus speed jumpers are in the correct configuration for your machine.

Replace the capacitors in your VRM module. If your VRM was manufactured by Royal Technology, replace it entirely. This component is also an indicator that you have a very early G3, which relates to the following:

Beige G3s have extremely troublesome ATA controllers and the earlier machines are spectacularly bad. I would recommend getting a PCI ATA or SATA host card if you plan to use this machine much. Not only will this improve reliability, it will be far faster too. That said, Mac-compatible ATA cards have gotten rather expensive. A SIL3112 SATA card with the Seritek firmware would be a good alternative and likely much cheaper, although you will have to replace the card's ROM chip with a larger one that has been flashed with the Mac firmware.

If you have a Mac-compatible PCI video card lying around, give it a try in the G3 and see what happens.

This is all I can think of to suggest but I will update this thread if I think of anything else to try. Good luck!
 

macuserman

Well-known member
Beige G3s have extremely troublesome ATA controllers and the earlier machines are spectacularly bad. I would recommend getting a PCI ATA or SATA host card if you plan to use this machine much. Not only will this improve reliability, it will be far faster too. That said, Mac-compatible ATA cards have gotten rather expensive.
@EffingController If you do end up going this route shoot me a message if you can't find a card I might have one.
 

micheledipaola

Well-known member
Hi, I just stumbled upon a beige desktop G3 a few days ago myself, and for 20€ it came home with me.
I am just starting to inspect it: I removed the battery and I have noticed that turning it on from the keyboard, keyboard lights flash, psu fan spins but I get no chime and no boot. I will go through all the steps you proposed, but maybe you have some specific advice for this situation? and, most important: is this one of those Macs which will not boot without a charged battery in the holder? maybe I should try with a new battery first of all :D
 
Hi, I just stumbled upon a beige desktop G3 a few days ago myself, and for 20€ it came home with me.
I am just starting to inspect it: I removed the battery and I have noticed that turning it on from the keyboard, keyboard lights flash, psu fan spins but I get no chime and no boot. I will go through all the steps you proposed, but maybe you have some specific advice for this situation? and, most important: is this one of those Macs which will not boot without a charged battery in the holder? maybe I should try with a new battery first of all :D
I'm pretty sure I started my G3 up a handful of times without a battery. According to the manual, the G3 uses a +5V trickle line from the PSU to start so the battery shouldn't be necessary. With that said, it would be worth using a multimeter to confirm that your power supply is putting out the voltages required to continue powering the machine.

For my problem, I just ended up getting a BlueSCSI with a DB25 connector from Androda (I bought it from here if you're interested.) I'm plugging that into the SCSI port on the back of the G3. It's working like a charm. Eventually, I still want to try out the PCI ATA/SATA solution, just for curiosity's sake if nothing else.

After I got the G3 running with the BlueSCSI, I found that it can actually read CDs, albeit very, very slowly. Haven't tried hooking an ATA hard drive up to it again, but I imagine it'll be the same and further implicate the ATA controller.
 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
Slowly reading the CDs is probably a drive with the laser on its last legs (or bad capacitors in it).
 
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