upgrade beige g3 266

[techwar]

I am a windows tech guy and I am getting in over my head hear. I now have a MAC beige G3 266. I purchased OS 10.3 Panther to install on this mac. What are the steps I should take to upgrade this system.
I have parts for windows systems. EIDE Western digital 40 gb Hard drive. Currently has a 4 gb ATA hard drive installed.
I upgraded memory to 354 mb ram with(PC100 DIMMS). What about a video card? I would appreciate your help.

If life knocks you down, get back up and live.

 

[jmgalvin]

You might want to look at some of the manuals and specs. Try here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=50122

You can also get specs here:

http://www.info.apple.com/support/applespec.html

Don't expect that thing to be any screemer under osx. It would work very fact on OS 9 or earlier. I'd make a backup of the hard drive as it is, if it boots, just to keep things - in case.

If this machine has a working OS in it, you might want to click on the Apple menu and look for Apple system Profiler, to find out what's in the machine - hardwarewise, buswise, etc. If you can't find system Profiler on the Apple menu, it'll be somewhere on the hard drive. By Opening any folder, you'll find out how much HD space is available, by looking at the bottom of the window.

If you want to load in OSX, and you have enough space, just insert the first installer cd, open it up and hit install. Anything already on the hard drive is generally preserved. the installer will handle rebooting from the cd.

If you want to replace the drive, take out the first one, install the new one, put the install cd in and boot while holding down the c key. When it boots from the installer, go to the File menu and look for Disk Utility. Just follow the steps to initialize the new drive. When that's done, install osx.

If you're adding the second drive and you have OSX on the first drive, you can run disk utility from the old drive - no need to boot from the CD.

I'd see how it works, before messing with any video cards, etc.

http://www.owcomputing.com

is a good, fairly priced source of video cards, drives, etc, for macs.

 

[jimbopalmer]

The beige G3 is not a supported platform for 10.3 you will need XPostFacto 3 to get it to run at all.

http://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/

I think the Beige G3 will need a partition of under 8 gig (try 7.4 gig) with OSX in it as the first partition on the drive. The rest of the drive can be one partition with data on it

http://lowendmac.com/ppc/g3.shtml

By today's standards both the memory bus and the IDE bus are very slow. PCI video cards are also passe' but the AYI 9200 is a modern card available in a Mac PCI form factor

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/ATI Technologies/100436011/

I tried to remain child-like, all I acheived was childish.

 

[techwar]

Thank you all for your comments. The installed hard drive is 4 gb with 2 gb free. When I change out the hard drive with an EIDE hard drive the drive is not recognized. The process I did is: Make sure hard drive is set to master. Connected power and cable. Placed os10.3 in cd drive. Press c while system is booting. The screen display a diskette image in he center with a question mark in it. I take this to mean the MAC is unable to see the hard drive. Any thoughts?

If life knocks you down, get back up and live.

 

[jmgalvin]

Actually, no. If you're booting and you get the ? mark, it means the machine is not recognizing the startup disk. In this case it would be the CD.

If you happen to have the software install disks (os 9 or earlier) try booting from that to make sure the cd drive is ok. Try pressing c as soon as you hit the power button.

You might check the Apple osx site and search for "supported" to see if you can get x into this thing - as jimbopalmer mentioned -but that really should not effect booting from the cd.