Conquest: Blue G3

[mac-man6]

My friend just gave me a G3 they had at his printing company that was going to be thrown out. It's not too dusty in side, although I haven't booted it yet. There's no hard drive and I've pulled the ram too identify them and this long mystery PCI card. The mystery card has what looks like a mac monitor port and the chips say it's a Twin Turbo 128m8a.

The board is a 820-0987-A, which is a Rev 1, it seems. What does that mean and what are it's limitations?

More details once I have more than 5 minutes with it.

 

[Mars478]

Rev 1's have glitches with the ATA controller (Can be overcome with a PCI ATA/SATA/SCSI Card), otherwise nothing that different. I think the B&W G3 is a great Mac Tower, especially for servers. I wish mine worked... :simasimac:

 

[mac-man6]

I remember hearing that. So what's that mean? I'll have unreliable master and slave on both IDE motherboard connections?

 

[Unknown_K]

I think you will have issues with any slave drives on either channels under classic mac os.

 

[jruschme]

I remember hearing that. So what's that mean? I'll have unreliable master and slave on both IDE motherboard connections?

There should be a big thread about it on AccelerateYourMac, but the gist is that the controller for the primary channel (which is not the same as used for the secondary channel with the CD-ROM and Zip) has UDMA problems above a certain ATA level. The issue is not with slave drives, but with drives much above the minimal performance level of the original 6gb drive.

The canonical way to deal with the problem is to either upgrade to a rev 2 board, use a PCI ATA controller or use SCSI. Some people have also reported success (albeit with a performance hit) by using an older 40-pin (IDE, not ATA) cable on the primary bus. Basically, this limits the controller's ability to use the higher DMA/UDMA levels, even if the drive supports them.

John

 

[mac-man6]

The G3 has been booted with OS 8.6 but for some reason won't boot to OSX. 256mb of ram, Twin Turbo 8mb secondary pci video card, 300mhz.

 

[Mars478]

What OSX are you trying to boot?

 

[mac-man6]

Panther and Tiger install CDs. They'll load on my iMac but not on the G3. I have an external DVD writer hooked up to the G3 it will list it in System Profiler but I can't access any CD from it, even the 8.6 CD I used to install.

As a side note the drive setup included with 8.6 disk wouldn't format my 40gb IDE drive to HFS+, only HFS Standard.

 

[mac-man6]

Update, my USB flash drives don't work in 8.6 and I get an error type 1010 trying to installing 9.2. But as of now I have 10.0 running and with 8.6 on a different partition. After some researching it seems the Yikes G4 and BW G3 can't boot off firewire

 

[mac-man6]

Swapped the CD drive for DVD and I now have OS 9.2 and 10.3. Sweet.

 

[mac-man6]

For some reason I can only boot into OS9, if I select OSX in startup disk the mac will chime and it will not output video. Don't know why...

 

[ppuskari]

Any chance you OS 9.x partition is the first partition set?

You might be up against the OSX 8 Gig startup volume limitation...

Try repartitioning, and installing OS 9 on to a partition >8 gig out in the disk land.

Or just copy over the contents of the partition from the first to the second, then install OSX onto the FIRST defined partition. I think it has to exist entirely in the first 8 gig of the drive to work.

Someone please correct me on this if I'm whacked.. What do the new macs do? Giant drives and 8 gig nowadays sounds limiting. Or was this only for early osx versions?

 

[LCGuy]

The 8GB limitation was only for Beige G3s and Tray load iMacs. AFAIK the B&W G3 can have a partition of any size for a startup volume, and in any location on the drive. (the Beige G3s and tray load iMacs also required that the 8GB or smaller partition be at the beginning of the drive)

I'd say the problem might be with the Twin Turbo card, if I'm correct that card was never supported under OS X...try swapping it out for a supported ATI or Nvidia card if you have one handy.

 

[ppuskari]

Well, that certainly makes sense. That would sound like a video card fail in OSX.

I really need to install my bigger hd in the b&w and set things up much better to my liking then.

Thanks for the clarification!

 

[H3NRY]

A B&W is a new world ROM Mac so it doesn't have the 8GB limit, but it does have a 128GB limit to a HD on the internal controller. A rev 1 ATA controller chip will be flaky with most modern drives. You almost have to have a PCI disk controller unless you have the rev 2 ATA chip. If the rearmost drive bracket takes a single drive, you probably have rev 1. If the bracket is U-shaped and holds 2 drives stacked, you probably have rev 2.

A Rage 128 video card is standard in that model, and is compatible with the widest range of OS 8, 9, and 10. They are also common and cheap. For OS X Tiger, an FX5200 PCI card will give Quartz Extreme acceleration, but will be limited to VGA 256 color and single resolution in OS 9, at least with the ROM from TheMacElite wiki.

The B&W is a nice machine, but has a lot of small flakinesses with USB, Firewire, and disks. For everyday use, a Sawtooth AGP G4 is almost its twin, and lots of bugs were worked out by that time. If you prefer Bondi Beach blue over graphite grey, the plastics from the two models are interchangeable. I've been using a B&W for several years and recently retired it for a Sawtooth.