Hi, I am noob to mac and this site so forgive my ignorance.
I have just acquired a beige G3 Power PC running OS9.2.
It had a norton disk, so I ran a disk scan.
It found and error.
We attempted to fix it.
The mac told me the drive was locked.
I tried to restart.
Only a disk icon comes up with a question mark in it.
I was dissapointed.
Help me please....
I tried holding down the c key while booting with ther norton disk just to see if it would break through but no.
Once again, Halp me, please.......
The first thing I would do in your situation is disconnect the floppy drive. A faulty floppy drive can stall your computer at the start. I just remove my floppy drives on most of my old macs to avoid that problem. And while you're inside the computer check to see if the CD drive is an Apple brand and check the cable connections. You also might try disconnecting the harddrive and trying the C key again just to see if it will startup from the Norton CD without the harddrive.
Cheers for the advice.
Unfortunately it had little effect. I tried unhooking the zip, floppy and HD but still couldn't get that norton disk to boot me.
I will now go get a new OS and say good bye to all my old files
If you think this may be a bit rash please stop me. I am thinking it is about all I have left option wise though.
If your Mac had been disconnected from AC power for a while, the internal memory battery may have died. See Mac PRAM, NVRAM, CUDA/PMU & Battery Tutorial
http://www.geocities.com/texas_macman/pram.html
Cheers, Tom
Mac Troubleshooting, Maintenance & Tips
http://www.geocities.com/texas_macman/MacTroubleshoot.html
You present mysteries. You say you just picked up the G3 and you're new to macs, but you've already got old files on the harddrive. And what do you mean you will get a new OS? Do you mean a new harddrive? If you can't boot to CD, then the problem may be elsewhere than the harddrive, ie. motherboard, RAM, etc.. How about trying a different CD drive? I also don't understand what you mean by the mac said the drive was locked. Did Norton Utilities say that, or was it a Mac error window? If the harddrive is not totally corrupted, then of course, you could recover files by putting the harddrive in another Mac.
Let me try answer some of these mysteries for you.
I was given the computer, thus it was full old programs etc. The previous owner basically just deleted what files they had and gave it to me to play with.
As far as getting a new OS, I was going to get a copy of tiger. But now that you mention it I have not been able to get the cd drive to boot with my norton disc in there (the one that killed it, but the only disk I have on me right now to try boot from) so maybe the drive will not work for another disc.
Can I whip my cd drive out of my pc and replace the mac one with it just to test?
The locked drive part may have been a norton box, I only saw it once and not for long sorry.
Can I format a drive in my pc to boot my mac? or can I get a download for a startup disk for it?
I am very appreciate for any input, I don't know the first thing about macs so I have tried disconnecting drives and holding down the different key combos and pressing the CUDA(Is that it's name?) button.
But in the end my smiling mac turns to a question mark of eternal anguish.
I assume the Norton CD is Norton Utilities or Norton Systemworks and has either a simple Mac OS 9 or 8 or 7.5 on it so that it can boot from the CD. Perhaps the CD is damaged? If you have an OS 9 install CD (or any of the OS 8 to 8.6) you can boot from it, or even an OS 8 or 7.5 disk utility floppy disk. I'm not sure how far back in Mac OS's the Beige can handle. Inside the simple boot system on any of those disks you'd be able to run Disk FirstAid and check and perhaps repair your harddrive. Although, I shouldn't be answering because I'm not that familiar with the Beige. I had one for a short period a couple of years ago. But you're not going to have any luck with Tiger. I don't even think you can put Tiger on a Beige, and anyway, I think Tiger uses a DVD install disc, not CD. Some non-Apple CD drives will boot Mac OS--which ones, I'm not sure. I've been able to boot from others, so you might try your PC drive. The great mystery is why it doesn't boot from the CD. It's the Mac version of Norton, isn't it? Is it an ATA drive? Then there would be the question of whether the master-slave jumper settings on the harddrive and CD drive are correct. There's lots of different thing you can try, it all depends on what you have access to, ie. external scsi harddrives and the disks mentioned earlier. Did you try zapping the PRAM? Hold option+command+p+r right after startup and before the screen comes on. Don't let go of the keys. When the screen does come on, it will only blink on and then off, and then you'll here the chime because the computer then restarts. That's a zap. But still don't let go of the keys. Zap maybe three times (three chimes) in a row before letting go of the keys and then just wait, for maybe even 5 minutes for the computer to find a system, and hopefully it will find the system on the Norton CD. Diskwarrior is even better at recovering harddrives, if you can borrow a copy of it.
cheerio
I have acquired a copy of osx.2 and have tried to install this.
I am having issues.
I will post a new thread on this one.
cheers for the help thus far.
has the firmware been updated to the most current one?
another thing is to disconnect everything but the Hard drive, and one stick of ram.
there was an 8.1 boot floppy. you might want to google for that. I will edit this post when i find it.
The 'Beige' (Platinum really!) G3s have no firmware, so have no need for updating. However, those models aren't supported for Jaguar (10.2) so you'll need XPostFacto to install. Also, if using a drive on the internal ATA bus 8GBs or larger, the drive must be partitioned so that the first partition is smaller than 8GBs, else OS X will not install, nor could you boot into X from that drive.
Also, while others's opinions may differ, I strongly discourage you (or anyone really) from using Norton Disk Doctor, espcially any versions for OS X. While I have no experience with it myself, I've heard and read too many tales of woe from seasoned professionals relating where Norton has only made problems worse. My drive troubleshooting tool of choice remains Disk Warrior, about which I've heard only praise.
dan k
10.2 should install fine on a G3, it's 10.3 you need XPF for.
Yes, Diskwarrior! I've recovered many harddrives with Diskwarrior when other utiilities have failed, but of course, you'd have to be able to boot into the Diskwarrior CD (the older version would be fine), which it doesn't sound like it may be possible with your Beige G3 for some reason. You're best hope might be with an external SCSI device hooked up to the onboard external SCSI port--a CD drive using the Norton, or an external SCSI harddrive with a system on it. You might even try hooking an internal SCSI harddrive with a system to the internal SCSI port.
If you have a hardware problem, Techtool Pro does diagnostics for those.
For OS 9, my regular maintenance routine is to rebuild the directory with Diskwarrior, then run Techtool Pro 3, then run Norton Disk Doctor, then run Norton Speed Disk. I find Speed Disk to be much better at defragging and optimizing than any of the other defragging utilities I've tried. As you can see I rely on Diskwarrior and Techtool to fix problems before I go to Norton. Like Dankephoto says, I've found Norton Disk Doctor to be the least reliable of utilities, and at times in the past, a suspect of compounding problems, but by the time Diskwarrior and Techtool have finished with the harddrive, usually there's only bad creation dates for Norton to find.
For OS X, I've been using Drive 10 instead of Diskwarrior, simply because I picked up a copy cheap. It's hard to tell if it's as good as Diskwarrior, but they claim it is. You could try that also, although, again, it's questionable if you could boot from it. I don't even remember if you can boot from the CD. I typically have a second small harddrive or partition with it's own system and all the utilities installed on it so that I can startup from it and use it to maintenance my main harddrive. And in the case of a major crash, as you say you've had, with the second harddrive/partition, the computer has another system to find if the main system is corrupted beyond recognition.