I recently purchased a Power Macintosh G3 (beige) without a Hard Drive. Most of the trouble has been choosing either SATA or IDE and getting a proper OS disk. Currently I'm stuck at the white floppy-disk-question-mark screen. I've been attempting to boot from burned .iso disks of OS 9 (burned from my 2010 iMac) but I'm told the G3 won't recognize them. Of course it could also be the spare HDD I'm using. Should I get a SATA bridge card? What SATA drive works? Is it possible to get the Mac to boot from burned disks rather than buying a proper OS 9 disk?
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The beige G3 usually requires a hard drive 120gb or smaller.
OSX has to be on a partition 8gb or smaller. OS9 doesn't.
I’ve used burned CDs and DVDs to install OS9 and OSX on a beige G3. I copied disks I has to avoid wear and tear on the disks I have. Some OS9 disks that came with a Mac were made for that machine and won’t install on a different model, though usually they’ll at least boot.
Is there a specific SATA drive I should get apart from size though?
Maybe you already know this, but you can put an internal 50-pin SCSI drive in the G3 too. The connector for SCSI is towards the back of the motherboard, right side, near the ports.
Yes, you can boot from a CD-R.
A beige G3 would have come with a PATA, not a SATA drive, yes?
It works with IDE drives. But it was suggested to me that SATA might make it faster/less prone to failure.
Correct, so one would install an additional interface to use SATA.
I didn't realize you could do that. When my PowerBook G4's internal HD died, acquiring a large 2-inch PATA drive was somewhat time-consuming and more expensive per GB than a SATA drive. If I'd known you could utilize adapters...
I’ve used the Sonnet Tempo SATA cards.
They can be hard to find though
I don't know about adapters, but you can get SATA PCI cards that will work in a G3. Such as this, for example.
I thought of using a SATA Bridge card, since the sonnet cards are rather hard to find at this point.