Why won't the OS9 CD find my hard drive?
August 25, 2006 4:12 PM Subscribe
Re-installing OS9 on an OldWorld G3 with the goal of installing Linux - OS9 install CD wants to initialise the perfectly-working hard drive. Wtf?
So I recently inherited a Power Macintosh G3 with a buggy OS 9 installation on it. This would be a perfectly useful machine if I could just get Ubuntu on it. Here's the problem: when I try to use the OS 9.2 installation disk to make some partitions (one for OS 9, to install Xboot, one or more for Linux), it says it doesn't recognise the hard drive and needs to initialise it. This hard drive has a clean re-install of OS 9 on it. At one random point, I got the installation to mostly recognise the hard drive: it installed just fine, but it wouldn't go through the initialisation process so I could re-partition.
When I tell it to go ahead and initialise the "unrecognised" disk, it runs for a while and then crashes with an error, either "Error 10" without a program, or "Error 11" in "Finder."
I'm somewhat to fairly familiar with Macintoshes and MacOS, I'd be much more comfortable in Linux and would be able to do a lot more with it, so I'd really like to try and figure out what's wrong with it.
Specs:
Power Macintosh G3/300MHz
128MB RAM
6GB hard drive
All hardware is Apple original (in my research I've noticed that non-Apple CDROM drives sometimes have problems booting and such.)
So I recently inherited a Power Macintosh G3 with a buggy OS 9 installation on it. This would be a perfectly useful machine if I could just get Ubuntu on it. Here's the problem: when I try to use the OS 9.2 installation disk to make some partitions (one for OS 9, to install Xboot, one or more for Linux), it says it doesn't recognise the hard drive and needs to initialise it. This hard drive has a clean re-install of OS 9 on it. At one random point, I got the installation to mostly recognise the hard drive: it installed just fine, but it wouldn't go through the initialisation process so I could re-partition.
When I tell it to go ahead and initialise the "unrecognised" disk, it runs for a while and then crashes with an error, either "Error 10" without a program, or "Error 11" in "Finder."
I'm somewhat to fairly familiar with Macintoshes and MacOS, I'd be much more comfortable in Linux and would be able to do a lot more with it, so I'd really like to try and figure out what's wrong with it.
Specs:
Power Macintosh G3/300MHz
128MB RAM
6GB hard drive
All hardware is Apple original (in my research I've noticed that non-Apple CDROM drives sometimes have problems booting and such.)
Response by poster: You think it's the hard drive? I ran a bad sectors check, it's clean. It installs and runs OS 9 just fine. I can't see why it SHOULD be the hard drive, but if I can get my hands on another hard drive I'll try that.
posted by notnamed at 5:45 PM on August 25, 2006
posted by notnamed at 5:45 PM on August 25, 2006
Yeah, my guess is either a bad HD or a bad system disk.
Unsubstantiated Rumor: I've heard that the SCSI or IDE controllers can go bad on the motherboard, meaning that all input/output is going to be bad.
posted by lekvar at 6:58 PM on August 25, 2006
Unsubstantiated Rumor: I've heard that the SCSI or IDE controllers can go bad on the motherboard, meaning that all input/output is going to be bad.
posted by lekvar at 6:58 PM on August 25, 2006
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It's a standard IDE drive, so try a different one.
posted by cillit bang at 5:11 PM on August 25, 2006