Extremely unstable Beige G3

[Phreakinus]

I have a beige G3 with:

233mhz G3

128MB RAM

Voodoo 2 12MB

80GB HD

craptacular IDE CD drive

two USB cards

8MB VRAM

The thing has given me so many errors I can't believe it even runs.

Error -3, -199, crashes on booting a 9.2.2 CD, gives errors about various extensions upon trying to boot the CD, disk utility crashes.

I don't know what to do, I have never seen a computer behave this way. I tried lots of different RAM, so I don't think it's a RAM issue.

 

[porter]

Dump the USB cards for starters.

Test the system with the bare minimum hardware and add components as you gain confidence in it.

Also is there a ROM upgrade for these beasts?

 

[Cory5412]

If either of the USB cards is a blue Belkin USB2 card, that's the likely culprit. Those particular cards cause problems in every single 4-handles G3 or G4 system I've heard about them being installed in, after awhile, my b/w G3 (Yikes! board) just wouldn't start up with the card installed.

 

[Unknown_K]

How do you get 8MB of VRAM in a G3, its 2MB with a 4MB upgrade isn't it?

The errors you mentioned usualy mean bad ram, try 1 good stick only and see what happens.

Do you have a personality card installed? If not do you need a terminator installed there?

Has somebody messed with the CPU jumpers trying to overclock?

 

[Phreakinus]

Yeah my mistake, it's 6MB.

And I've tried several different sticks of RAM... Personality card is installed.

I believe it's just that 9.2.2 just doesn't like old world macs... I'm going to try 9.1

 

[Mike Richardson]

You said 80 GB HD... I remember a lot of stuff about 8 GB and how the OS has to be in the first 8 GB and things like that.

 

[tomlee59]

I have 9.2.1 on one of mine, and it's quite solid.

I second the advice from others that you should throttle back to the minimum configuration (especially the removal of the USB cards) and work your way back up.

Another possibility is a flaky power supply. I've encountered more than one case of a marginal supply. You may want to measure the 5V and 12V supply voltages to preclude this as a culprit. Also, carefully inspect the motherboard for any telltale smudges from leaking caps, pram battery, etc.

 

[alk]

You said 80 GB HD... I remember a lot of stuff about 8 GB and how the OS has to be in the first 8 GB and things like that.

That is only for OS X. There is no such restriction for OS 9.

Peace,

Drew

 

[gobabushka]

what is the cd drive set to, make sure its set to master

 

[iMac600]

Apparently the 8GB issue has extended to Mac OS 9 somewhat as well.

http://lowendmac.com/mail/mb07/1210.html#0

 

[Unknown_K]

Interesting, I have a 13GB boot drive for OS 9.2.2 on my Beige G3 MT and have yet to see a problem (it's not full yet).

 

[Phreakinus]

Yeah I have 9.1 installed now, but it is still a very odd machine, sometimes it will freeze at boot, I just clear the pram at boot and do some openfirmware commands, seems to help at least.

Macs apparently, do not "just work".

 

[alk]

That's complete bunk.

I've got disks way bigger than that with the OS installed entirely on the second partition.

The OS puts data in the first few blocks of the disk that tells the ROM where to find the rest of the system data. The Mac's ROM contains code to access all the disk space addressable by the controller, so once the ROM takes over at boot from Open Firmware, it doesn't matter where the OS is installed. As OS X doesn't use the on-board ROM, things are much trickier. Hence the 8 GB partition restriction.

Peace,

Drew

 

[register]

I have a similar machine, clocked to 300 MHz, running pretty good with 9.2.2 as well as 10.2.8. The 80 GB harddisk is partioned, and with the help of xpostfacto you can work around the 8 GB issue, easily.

Once I installed the dantz retrospect software that came with a Maxtor OneTouch drive. Big mistake, the machine was like dead, not bootable anymore. It took several days to find all information to reanimate the computer. A complete reset of any PRAM setting was necessary.

To obtain this, you need to

1. unplug the power supply

2. remove the PRAM battery

3. find and depress a tiny little reset pushbutton on the mainboard for a while. This hidden reset button is located in the neighbourhood of one of the expansion card slots.

You could perform this mainboard reset to exclude a corrupted PRAM as a cause of the trouble.

 

[Devon]

i love you phreakinus you are my hero.