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Hard drive formatter that would work with a B&W G3

EvieSigma

Young ThinkPad Apprentice
68020
I recently obtained a B&W G3, which has finally stopped making an awful noise thanks to me swapping the twin 6GB drives (which are probably bad, the WD one definitely is) with a single 40GB drive I scavenged from my deceased Dell. However, I seem to have come upon a problem: I made an OS 9.2.2 install CD and it won't work, and I think the data from the Dell remaining on the drive is the culprit. Does anyone know a bootable formatting software that will run on a G3? Even if my install CD is bad, I still need to delete all the old Windows system files.

 
Drive Setup would work on the machine which is on the MacOS cd however because your Dell hard drive does not identify as an Apple product the utility will refuse to let you format it.

 
Drive Setup would work on the machine which is on the MacOS cd however because your Dell hard drive does not identify as an Apple product the utility will refuse to let you format it.
Hrmm...this is a problem. I was hoping I could format the drive without having to buy a USB to IDE cable or put the drive in another computer but I might not have a choice. 

 
Drive Setup doesn't care for Apple branding in IDE drives, the Dell drive might have some sort of locked partition, perhaps try formatting it on a PC first before putting it in the B&W G3 (and ensure it is set to the right slave/master jumper settings)

 
It's the only drive so it is set as master...I'll try putting it in my beige box Pentium III and running Daban's Boot and Nuke.

On a side note, do I need to do any reformatting to make a Mac OS install disk or can I just burn the ISO? I forget if I used HFVExplorer when I made a 8.1 disk.

 
If you have a bootable Mac OS X 10.3 or 10.4 installer disk (note: you need to have either a DVD-ROM drive installed, or to obtain the CD-ROM version, because the standard release was on DVDs, at least for 10.4), you could use Disk Utility from within the installation environment to format your disk.

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When you write that "it won't work" -- do you mean that the Mac OS 9 CD will not boot at all, or that you can not format the drive in the blue-and-white?

What procedure are you using to try to format the drive in the G3?

 
The install CD doesn't run, I just get a folder icon that swaps between the Finder logo and a question mark.

I tried using Daban Boot and Nuke but either it's a Windows only program or I have to burn it in HFS format to work, I guess.

 
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DBAN is an x86 Linux distro. It should work fine on a PC, burnt as an image like any other disc.

 
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It does work on PCs, but it didn't do anything when I popped the CD in the G3. Just kept giving me the Finder face/Question Mark folder icon.

 
The install CD doesn't run, I just get a folder icon that swaps between the Finder logo and a question mark.

I tried using Daban Boot and Nuke but either it's a Windows only program or I have to burn it in HFS format to work, I guess
You shouldn't need to be doing anything weird to the image to burn it. It's an ISO. it's an exact image of the disc. Burn it as-is and it will work.

 
One hard drive wipe later, popped the hard drive back in, put my OS 9.2.2 disk back in...and still nothing. There's nothing on the hard drive now (if there is, it's insignificant) so I guess this means my install disk is bad. I'll have to  look for a different ISO...

 
Mac OS 9.2.1 and 9.2.2 discs or images are very often just updaters which are not bootable and require a running Mac OS 9.2 or 9.2.1 system, respectively. Some may also be one disk from a machine-specific restore disc set, and also not bootable.

A working, bootable install CD will boot to a basic Mac OS desktop with an installer application. You can open Drive Setup (from the CD) and initialise (format) the hard drive before running the installer.

Just in case your CD is good, try holding down the C key when powering on the Power Mac with the CD inserted. This tells the system to ignore the hard drive and boot from CD. Normally if the HD is blank or unable to boot, it will try booting from other devices, but sometimes it gets stuck trying to boot from the hard drive and ignores the CD.

 
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