Need some Beige G3 boot help

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Need some Beige G3 boot help

I am a new Mac user, but am sold for life! Cant figure out this boot thing though. I booted from a cd by holding 'c' on startup, decided not to install the software (never went past the cd boot screen) and then my mac wouldnt boot from anything but the cd.... ever.... I restarted holding every key combo imagineable and ended up wiping the drive and starting over... Dont want to make a habit of that! How do I boot from the HD after booting from a CD?

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PS....

The computer is running OSX.1.5 on a Beige PowerPC G3 333 mhz (Machine ID 406)

Jon
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Did you boot from a more rece

Did you boot from a more recent OS X disk, like os X.2? If so it propbably changed some firmware settings. Try booting from the older X CD, or zap the PRAM.

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Yes, resetting the PRAM almos

Yes, resetting the PRAM almost always works for me. After you hear the first startup chime, hold down the P, R, Option and Command keys at the same time until you hear the startup chime at least three more times.

Daniel

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Thanks but later....

Thanks for the replys... I am hesitant to try this again though for no reason, but I have the fix now, so if (and when) this happens again I wont feel the fool! Thanks!

PS... When this originally happened I had booted from the OSX.1 install disk (after having upgraded to x.1.5 online) and was looking at the disk maintenance options when I decided not to mess with what I didnt know about and tried to reboot from the HD and couldnt.

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Curiosity killed the novice

Ok.... I couldnt resist trying and now I am posting this from my computer at work. Arrrrgh! I held down ths c to boot from my OSX.1 disk then exited (never going past the boot screen on the cd) sure enough the computer only will boot to the cd and I get a ? floppy when the CD isnt in the drive... I zapped the pram as instructed and still get the ? floppy and the computer will still only boot from the cd. The only difference this time is my wife is ready to kill me cause I was so certain that I had the answer I didnt backup our data... OOPS... I went into the disk tools on the OSX.1 cd and the hard drive is there but not mounted. The "mount drive" option is grey in the menu. The disk utility says no problems on the HD.... Canya help?

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Not Killed, just undead

Don't worry mitch381, you drive is still there and intact as long as you don't erase it.

I have the same or similar problem.

It seems to me that the beige G3's (my rev A at least) are unable to recognize bootable OSX partitions at startup, it looks like they must be specified in Startup Disk. So if, like us: 1 you only have OSX installed (ie NO classic)
2 you run an OSX/CD based disk utility (these switch the startup disk to the CD)
3 OSX based disk utilities provide no access to Startup Disk controls..

You end up with no way to switch your Startup Disk back to your OSX volume...

There are workarounds of course:
1 IIRC OS9 system CD's allow access to Startup Disk, just start up with an OS9 cd and switch the Startup Disk in the control panel.

This won't work for my because the ADB port no longer works correctly for the mouse on my G3 :/ I just got a USB2 pci card and USB mouse and it works nicely for OSX, but not at all in OS9.

2 I see talk of using Open Firmware to reset the Startup Disk, but haven't figured that one out yet...

3 The Jaguar installer CD will correctly reset the Startup Disk to a freshly installed system - I've just rescued my G3 by installing Jaguar again on a different parition, logging into that, going straight to system preferences and setting my orginal Jaguar install as the Startup System...painful but it worked.

I'm thinking it's time to use BootCD to create an emergency disk for the G3. Smile

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