Greetings -
Am new to this forum, somewhat old to Macs, but am having a terrible time with this upgrade. I do audio editing & photography, am transferring most of what I had on a Sonnet 800mHz G4/8600 Powermac into a 300mHz Beige G3 Minitower, with a Sonnet G4, 1GHz Zif card(I've just added). The Beige G3 already had a 10GB drive with 9.2.2/OS X 10.2.8 that worked fine. I've transferred a 160GD & 40GB drive + Sonnet's 133 ATA card into the Beige G3.(160 had 9.1 & 10.2.8, 40GB just 9.1). I cannot start in from any of the OS X drives.
I had 1GB ram in the old 8600/G4, I have 768mb Ram in the Beige G3. I also transferred the Radeon video card(32mb) into the Beige G3.
I've used Sonnet's "Start-up Disk" control panel - no luck.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
Thanks,
John
On the Beige G3, your startup OS X IDE drive partition must be less than 8.4GB. It is best to have that as the first partition on the drive.
Jon -
Thanks for the sppedy reply. The startup drive is partitioned correctly, on both drives with OS X. I'm having a conflict somewhere & cannot pin it down. The Beige G3 did fine with the 10GB 9.2.2/OS X 10.2.8 drive, and the 8600/G4(800mHz) with the 40GB (9.1) and the 160GB 9.1/10.2.8 drives did fine. PRoblem happened when I upgraded the Beige G3 with the Sonnet 1GHz G4 card and added the two other drives!
I can't get either of the OS X drives to boot, just "black" video!
Did the PRAM get zapped? OS X modifies some of the Open Firmware settings when it is installed. You might need to boot from the install CD again to get it to reapply them. I've not had to do that before so I'm not sure if it would work right or not, but it might be worth a shot.
EDIT: Oh, wait! Are you using both the internal video and the ATI card, or just the ATI card? IIRC there are problems with using PCI video cards in a Beige under OS X. You might try hooking something to the stock internal video and seeing what you get.
You could try downloading XLR8s software for their G4 ZIFs from the Daystartechnology.com site. It should work fine with the Sonnet CPU.
There are too many variables here and it's not possible to determine which one is the problem, so I recommend you back up and install the components one at a time. Revert the G3 back to its previous working condition. I assume you're using XpostFacto to switch beween 9.2.2 & 10.2.8?, set it to 9.2.2 once to make sure it runs OK, then shutdown.
1. verify that 10gb drive is primary-master.
2. INSTALL SONNET G4 UPGRADE first, no software needed to run except to activate the cache on the chip, the XLR8 sofware work good for this under 9.2.2
3. switch to 10.2.8, make sure that runs fine.
4. switch back to 9.2.2 and shutdown
5. INSTALL SONNET ATA-133 card next, install card only, no HD connected
6. reboot into 9.2.2 and load any software you need for hte ATA-133 card, verify card shows up in SystemProfiler
7. reboot into 10.2.8 next, load any software needed, verify card shows up in SystemProfiler
8. switch back into 9.2.2 and shutdown
9. ATTACH 40GB & 160GB HARD-DRIVES to ATA-133, leave 10gb attached to MB
10. reboot into 9.2.2. and make sure the 10gb & 40gb HDs mount (the 160gb may not show up)
11. reobot into 10.2.8 and make sure all three hard-drives mount
12. reboot into 9.2.2 and shutdown
13. ATTACH ATI RADEON VIDEO card
14. reboot into 9.2.2 and load any ATI drivers needed for card
15. reboot into 10.2.8 and load ATI drivers
That's the process you'll most likely need to go through. The hardware is installed in the order of most beneficial upgrade. The 1ghz G4 on the faster G3 MB will give you the best bump in performance over the 8600. Then the HDs and their faster controller makes another incremental improvement. Lastly, the ATI graphics card outperforms the onboard video, but it doesn't improve the system's performance as much overall as the other components. This way, if you got a conflict somewhere along the way, you can back up one step and still have gotten the most out of your components.
Does anyone know why a beige minitower, wth a new 500MHz Sonnetech Encore Zip G4 installed would not recognize OS X install disks? The CD drive has no problem with OS 9.2 and Norton--even Norton for OS X. But my OS X Jaguar disks just spin until I get a message saying the disks are not initialized. I know it's not the disks because my newer G4 recognizes them fine.
Thebeige has 400MB RAM roughly, with three internals, a 30GB drive and a 80GB, which I partitioned into two.
I'm having exactly the same problem on my beige with a Daystar/XLR8 G4 450 and OS X 10.2.6 - it won't recognise Install Disc 1 at all. The disc reads fine in OS 9, and all other known-good CDs are reading OK in OS X.
Would this have anything to de with the fact that I am running a higher point release that the one on the disc? Or that I recently tried (and failed) to install XPostFacto/10.3?
What's with people saying you need XPostFacto to install 10.2 on a Beige? They were supported for that OS, and mine's worked fine, barring the above.
Greetings to all, and many thanks for the suggestions. I now have my Beige G3 up and running and maybe with some afterthoughts to help others. In summery: Radeon 7000 card in PCI slot 1, Sonnet tango(USB/Firewire) in slot 2, Sonnet Tempo(ATA 133) in slot 3.
The Beta (latest as of 3/2005) version of XPostFacto would not allow me to proceed with Install Disk 2 with 10.3(Panther), but I found the "stabile" version will, so I now have 10.3.8 and it's blazing along just fine. Still cannot get sound in throught the A/V (RCA jack) personality card.
Anyway, it's "do-able" and thanks to Neal at Sonnet Tech support and the many who offered valuable suggestions. Certain USB/Firewire cards do not work in this configuration, and it does appear to matter in which order the cards are installed.
I would be interested in hearing from anyone who has exceeded the 768mb "Apple blessed" ram max on this machine - I'm running Photoshop CS and Nikon Capture for a photography business and need gobs of ram....
Thanks again,
John
There are threads around here where some poeple have found that the RAM controller cannot handle higher than 16Mb chips, IIRC. Therfore, a DIMM w/ 16 chips at 16Mb is 256MB of RAM. 256MB per DIMM sticks us at the 768MB limit. People have tried 512MB DIMMs in Beige G3s and only half shows up. This is also why you need a double sided 256MB DIMM, as a single sided DIMM would have 8 32Mb chips, and would only show as 128Mb because the controller can only see the bottom 16Mb of each chip. You might setup a dedicated drive on your nice ATA133 card for swap, or even a dedicated partition, but the OS X swap setup is usually fine, and 768MB is gonna feed a Beige pretty well, as it's only running PC-66 SDRAM, unless the bus has been overclocked to 83MHz...
If it's really that essential, consider buying a newer computer. Older macs do many things well, but, especially with OS X, they can't keep up with ever-rising professional needs. It sounds like your needs have outgrown your computer. However well-upgraded it is, a beige G3 simply will not do for some things.
do a quick search on ebay for "b/w g3" buy a cheap 300mhz one with about 1 stick of 256mb ram in it and slap your sonnet 1 ghz card in there and that should soot you.
Are the drives in the machines stock from Apple, or are they 3rd party upgrades? I can't get my Beige to boot off of any CD drive except for the one that came with it.
If you have the Toast CD-Reader extension, you can use a 3rd party drive in the Beige under 8.5 - 9.x, but I haven't been able to find anything like that for OS X.
Cheers,
The Czar
You could always try the Compact Flash virtual memory trick ppl have used with success on RAM-limited Powerbooks. Put an IDE-CF adapter on a spare IDE connector, format a CF card as a drive and assign virtual memory to it.
CF speed comparisons and some more
Whether that's faster than HD VM?