imac help

Post by **mason** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 12:05 am

So I have a g3 imac and I went to install 10.3 on it only to find out evil apple requires you to "update the firmware" aha but before that I formatted the hard-drive. so now I have no os on it, and in order to install the firmware you need os 9 or os x on it. but I have nothing on it and whenever I boot up my computer, all I get is a black screen; nothing else.
so my question is if I pop in the os 9 cd, will it automatiaclly boot without the black screen?

Post by **lordofduct** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 12:20 am

the firmware will autoboot from CD if you hold the 'C' button down when you hit the power button.

Which G3 do you have? I ran 10.3 on a 900mhz G3 iBook and it ran like dog doo doo even after upping the ram to 768MB

[edit] oh and if you have one of the early iBooks (white books) or clam shells (the colourful laptop), the firmware is kinda a bitch to flash, if it is possible at all. I know nothing about the G3 desktops.

Post by **mason** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 12:33 am

i have a piece of crap, its 333 meghertz. but I plan on deleting all the crap from the os x and tweaking it to go faster. but we'll see, and I have to push some kind of button to install the firmware. stupid apple.

Post by **SnowKitty** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 2:30 am

mason wrote:i have a piece of crap, its 333 meghertz. but I plan on deleting all the crap from the os x and tweaking it to go faster. but we'll see, and I have to push some kind of button to install the firmware. stupid apple.

you should try the PPC build of ubuntu on it so it will actually be usable. OSX is gonna be too slow on something that old and ubuntu wont need any firmware updates that i know of

Post by **mason** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 4:22 am

well im going to put os 10.3 on it. but anyways, I have no os on my computer and when I start it up I just get a weird blue screen with the little mac man and a question mark ?. but now I have the problem of trying to burn a toast cd, I downloaded os 9 and its in a toast file. so how would I burn it in certianity that it will boot/work on my imac?

Post by **Niode** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 8:59 am

If it's a toast image you may be able to change the extension to .iso and it will burn in nero. However i couldn't garuntee it, if it's just a CD you're not gonna be losing much by making a coaster out of a cdr so i say it's worth a punt. IIRC toast images are just standard iso files.

Post by **marurun** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 3:36 pm

I can guarantee 10.3 on that iMac will be pretty much too slow to be worth using. As for the firmware update, as different models work differently, count on having to have an OS installed first. Do a simple install of OS 9 and update the firmware from there. Then you can install 10.3 over OS 9 and have a bootable Classic install for some of the fun older stuff that never got brought up to speed.