G3 Beige Desktop not recognizing a OS X 10.2 drive/CD...

[Michael Humphrey]

Hi! I'm kind of stumped. I've got a desktop Beige G3, 300 Mhz machine. It seems to handle the OS 9 version of things well.
It has a 6-8 Gb HD on it's primary IDE channel, formatted for 9.2.2 and that has been working well without problems.

It had an 80 Gb HD on it's 2ndary IDE channel, along with it's CD ROM drive (Apple default, I think it's a 24X). The 80 Gig drive had 2 partitions: the just slightly less than 8 Gig partition to install the OS X system, and the balance formatted for OS X using the OS X CD. It was working fine for 3 or more months, then ???

The OS X stuff just isn't recognized by the computer any more. Weird.
When I'm running OS 9/booting into OS 9, the system seems to handle the CD drive and OS 9 drive without a problem. The other drive is only intermittently available: sometimes when I boot, it is there, sometimes it isn't.
I've tried a number of combinations to see if I can make the computer boot into OS X. I've tried to boot from the OS X CD - I have been successful on occasion, and I was able to format a brand new 80 gig drive and reinstall OS X onto it (I thought maybe the original 80 Gig drive was dead...), but most of the time, it won't boot from the OS X CD.
After finally getting the OS X onto the new HD, the new HD won't boot the machine: I've tried changing the Master/Slave/Cable Select options, making the HD the only active drive in the computer, and swapping the channels the HD is on, making it the primary drive on one channel and then the next.

The computer seems to hate OS X now...

Any insights/suggestions would be appreciated...

(if a stick of RAM died, could that be a factor? I think there's only 384 Mb of RAM onboard (3x128) I suppose I could boot into OS 9 and see what the computer says is present/recognized...)

-Mike

[MacMoore]

Have you tried replacing the onboard backup battery?

[Dan Millar]

Which version of OS X? Beige G3s only support up to 10.2.8...

[Michael Humphrey]

re: battery: I don't _think_ it's a problem. I bought the machine 2nd hand last fall, and that's one of the 1st things I had to do was replace the battery. Hopefully the one I bought would be good for more than 6 months. Thus far, the OS 9 settings seem to be maintained when booted, so the battery is strong enough to maintain at least those settings.

re: OS it's 10.2.x  -it was patched to .8 when it failed to boot. The install CD only says 10.2  (don't know beyond that.)

I have purchased another beige G3 this weekend. Going to try a hard drive swap and see how that goes. I'm hoping it'll be as easy as that...

Still open to further suggestions.

-Mike

[Dan Millar]

Check your RAM!!! You said some died? The built-in RAM test is not thorough enough to find all bad RAM - check it with techtool or something that really wrings the RAM out. Also, the IDE controllers on B&WG3 towers were notorious for going bad - usually on one channel - no easy way to check that but you can check your drives on another machine. Hope that helps...

Dan

[Michael Humphrey]

Thanks for the input.
Not sure what I ended up doing that fixed the problem, but I was able to get the beast up and running again. It may have been the cabling. I also swapped out the CD ROM drive from the "new" used machine for the old one. The CD seemed to be behaving a little flaky. I checked all the cables and RAM for seating, I think I also swapped one out from the "new" machine as well. Thanks again! Happy daughter once more!

-Mike