I recently received an old 400mhz blue and white g3 from someone and intended to use if for some pre-OSX stuff I have. I managed to get it to start up, and was able to boot from the cd, install os9 on the harddrive, and the boot from the hard drive. Today after trying to start it up I got a flashing question mark for a few seconds and then the system asked me to type something like "mac:boot". After I did this it started up ok, and I proceeded to install an old game (warcraft II) I had. I then tried to launch the game afterward and the computer crashed giving me a bomb message and froze. Upon restart I am only able to get to a gray screen after the flashing question mark/logo appears. I cannot boot from the cd, tried starting with extensions off, and tried zapping the pram. Nothing seems to work. Does anyone have any ideas about what might be going on? I was thinking possibly a bad hard drive or a problem with the internal battery based on the limited info I could find on the internet. Thanks for any help!
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Trouble booting blue & white g3
- Thread starter infinitymb
- Start date
That does sound like corrupt PRAM, if you wound up in Open Firmware (the mac-boot prompt). Check your battery voltage - should be 3.6V minimum. If the battery is OK, then press the Cuda reset button once, wait 15 seconds and try a reboot.
If the HD has been replaced sometime in the machine's history, there is an excellent chance it is incompatible with a flaky IDE controller chip. Rev 1 motherboards don't support slave drives or UDMA-capable hard drives. You need an old 2GB or smaller drive like the Mac shipped with, or you need a PCI drive controller card. The rev 2 MB is usable with newer drives up to 128GB.
If the HD has been replaced sometime in the machine's history, there is an excellent chance it is incompatible with a flaky IDE controller chip. Rev 1 motherboards don't support slave drives or UDMA-capable hard drives. You need an old 2GB or smaller drive like the Mac shipped with, or you need a PCI drive controller card. The rev 2 MB is usable with newer drives up to 128GB.
If you start up while holding Option-Apple-O-F, can you get back to the Open Firmware prompt?
Another thing to try is a verbose boot - hold down V (or Apple-V) during startup. It will write the startup sequence to screen, and you may be able to see any error messages that come up.
If you have a copy of TechTool Pro or some other bootable system utility disk, it may be worth clearing the PRAM using one of those utilities. DriverGuru (briefly a member here) claimed that they do a deeper and more effective clearout of the PRAM than the usual Apple methods.
Course, it helps if the machine will boot to the CD at all :-/
Another thing to try is a verbose boot - hold down V (or Apple-V) during startup. It will write the startup sequence to screen, and you may be able to see any error messages that come up.
If you have a copy of TechTool Pro or some other bootable system utility disk, it may be worth clearing the PRAM using one of those utilities. DriverGuru (briefly a member here) claimed that they do a deeper and more effective clearout of the PRAM than the usual Apple methods.
Course, it helps if the machine will boot to the CD at all :-/
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