Tiger install on beige G3 with xpostfacto problems

[Green78II]

Ok, so if you read my buildup thread, you know that I have a 300 MHZ beige G3 minitower that I'm trying to install tiger on. It has 768 MB ram, rev. c ROM (recognizes second hard drive in os9), pioneer DVD rw drive, 80 GB Maxtor Hard drive, and the stock drive with os9.

I formatted an 8 GB partition in hfs+ using apple drive setup on the 80gb drive and ran xpostfacto with a tiger DVD in the DVD drive. I selected the formatted 8 gb partition in xpostfacto and it copied over some files to the partition then rebooted. I've mixed and matched the drives on both ide controllers with and without the os9 drive and the only thing it does is flash either "Cant Open" or "No Bootable HFS Partition". Is there something I'm missing or doing wrong?

 

[coius]

try making is something like 7.5GB. that's probably the problem.

 

[Green78II]

Just tried it. Screwed around with the drive configuration and got the same results as before. I wonder if I should partition the whole 80gb drive into 7.5gb partitions and see what that does.

 

[Christopher]

Just tried it. Screwed around with the drive configuration and got the same results as before. I wonder if I should partition the whole 80gb drive into 7.5gb partitions and see what that does.

try 7.0GB.

 

[Flash!]

I wonder if I should partition the whole 80gb drive into 7.5gb partitions and see what that does.

You'd just end up with a whole lot of 7.5GB patitions, which is nice...if that's what you want......

What you need to do is format your HD with a 8GB partition (or slightly smaller as others have pointed out) and a partition of whatever's left (about 70GB if you have a 80GB drive). The catch is that the 8GB partition must be the first partition for you to successfully load OSX.

It's been a long while since I've played with OSX on a G3, but one thing I do remember is that I sometimes had to boot into OS9 (with any old OS9 on a disk or CD that you may have) and run xpostfacto again, then reboot into osx. That is: run xpost before installing osx, then boot into OS9 and run it again, and then hopefully everything will be roses

 

[waynestewart]

I did the same install on a beige G3 some back and had a couple of problems. I had to format a partition not at but slightly under 8 gb and it had to be the first partition on the hard drive.

Wayne

 

[Christopher]

What I did when I had this problem is take the hard drive out, put it into a tiger capable mac, then install tiger on that first partition, before the user setup process, just take it out and put it into your beige.

 

[tmtomh]

A few points to add to the good advice others have contributed:

- As folks have said, Tiger must be installed on the first partition, and the partition should be smaller than 7.45GB (7.45GB binary is approximately 8 billion bytes)

- HOWEVER, it is unlikely that formatting your partition to 7.5GB or 8GB is your problem here. The partition-size problem usually only manifests itself if and when System files start to be located beyond the first 8GB of the boot drive. So in other words, the partition problem doesn't usually result in system instability right away.

- For me, problems installing Tiger (or Panther, for that matter) on beige G3s have most often happened when I've had two HDs in the computer, or when I've tried to install onto a HD set to slave. My recommendation would be to install Tiger with only one internal HD installed in the beige; and to have it be set to master and be the only device on that IDE bus.

- Also, if your machine's 300MHz status is overclocked, or if the bus speed is upclocked from 66MHz (to 83MHz), you might want to undo that during the initial installation and boot up.

- Finally, I have also found that there are some beige G3s that simply won't play nice with XPostFacto Panther or Tiger installs. In those rare instances, I've found, the best thing is to just install OS 9.2.2 and enjoy one of the fastest OS 9 machines around.

Good luck!

M

 

[Temetka]

You can also run Jaguar natively on the machine as it was supported.

I too have had many problems with running the bus at 83MHz and using more than 1 HDD, which is sad because there are all those wonderful drive bays just sitting there waiting to be used.

 

[register]

A great feature of xpostfacto is the possibility/necessity to use any disk supported in the early boot process as a helper disk and to boot afterwards into any other disk supported by this helper installation. You could use a little disk holding a tiny OS 9 installation with xpostfacto as a helper disk (for example the stock 4 GB or something like a small IDE flash disk) and afterwards boot into an internally or externally attached second disk (in case one expansion slot is occupied by a nice FW/IDE/SCSI host adapter card). This should bypass the 8 GB limit in the boot partition size as well as any disk performance throttle due to the cheap onboard IDE controller. Additionally, depressing the option key at boot time brings you always back to your classic OS 9 desktop