Will not boot after 10.3 upgrade 1

[mrbusy]

I aquired a G3 Mac from a friend who recently upgraded. I have no experience with Mac's so the problem I have encountered could be something very simple.

I plugged the Mac into my Dell TFT screen, which works perfetly well with my PC incidentally. To start with things were fine. The Mac booted without any problems but was running a old version of Mac OS (8.4 I think). I went out and purchased Mac OS X 10.3 and installed it. I had a strange problem during instlalation. The Mac appared to crash and when I restarted it nothing happened. I was able to recover the situation by inserting the 10.3 CD and pressing C during boot. The install continued to completion and I was able to use it. I then turned off the Mac and the next time I started it nothing happens. The c during boot cure no longer works and I am left with a system which I cannot use. When I turn on the Mac I get the chime sound, there is disk and CD activity and the Caps Lock key flickers, but after about 30 seconds it goes quiet and nothing else follows.

Does anyone know what the problem is here? I dont get and errors. Infact, the screen doesnt even come on. As I said, I have no experience with Mac's so I dont know how to diagnose the problem, or work around it. I'm not even sure if this is a hardware or software issue. Before I installed OS X though the system did appear to be fine, which makes me think its not hardware related.

Any help appreciated

 

[jimbopalmer]

I am not an OSX user, but to my knowledge, no Beige G3 is supported by 10.3, is your G3 a Blue and White model?

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

 

[mrbusy]

It's a blue and white model.

I have since discovered that this is a firmware problem. Im not sure how to fix it but I do have a work-around.

A friend recommended that I try pressing the apple key + option + p + r when I power on. This apparently sets the firmware back to the default settings and does allow the Mac to boot up. Unfortunately, although this allows OS X to run happily it has to be done each time I want to turn it on.

If anyone knows of a better fix than this please let me know.

 

[jimbopalmer]

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58374

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

 

[mrbusy]

I installed the firmware upgrade. I had to do a little playing around and boot using OS 8.6 before I could run the firmware updater, but I did get a message to say it had been sucessfull. Unfortunately that doesnt seem to have resolved the problem. I still have to do the four finger combination of Option + Apple + P + R each time I turn the Mac on to boot it. It's not very elegant, but it does work.


Any thoughts on anything else I could try?

 

[dodge20]

Have you tried running Disk Utility in OS X yet? You will have to boot from a X disk to repair the startup volume. Under the First Aid tab, verify the disk and the disk permissions for all volumes you see in the window to the left.

Do you still need OS 8.6? Sounds to me like a boot problem with OS 8.6. Maybe you want to reinstall your 8.6 OS? Or get rid of it if you don't need it.

Dodge20