Error when upgrading from 9.2.2 to osX

T

tbdad

Registered
Hi! Thanks for having this forum. I am a pc guy who is (since seeing the G5) thinking of coming over to the mac side, but right now I'm trying to update some donated imacs from 9.2.2. to osX. I get a message when trying to install the osX
that states " startup disk was unable to select the install cd as the startup disk"
Any help would be appreciated. As an aside, I have installed 160 of ram and all updates and firmware updates have been done.
Thanks!
 
A little background on the Macs you are attempting to upgrade would be helpful. Information such as:
  1. What model Macs are these?
  2. How big is the hard drive and are they formatted HFS or HFS+
  3. Are the optical drives original equipment from Apple?
  4. What version of OS X are you attempting to install?
FYI 160MB is insufficient RAM for decent performance with any version of OS X and is below the minimum required to install OS X 10.4 (Tiger). In addition the Tiger installer comes on a DVD not a CD so that could be your problem right there.
 
Thank you for your reply. The computer I'm working with right now is a PowerPC G3 333mhz 6gb harddrive which is 99% full and is formatted in HFS+. I do not know how to dlete the files. It says I can do a full erase and then install OS 10.2 but it won't even get to that point to let me make a choice.
 
From your description, it sounds like these are "Gossamer" machines that were built between November 1997 and January 1999. The "Gossamer" Macs predate many of the hardware features that are considered standard on new Macs such as Open Firmware, USB, and firewire. So a lot of the today's standard "fixes" will not work.

Try this, place the Jaguar install CD in the optical drive and then boot while holding down the "C" key, hopefully that will force the computer to boot from the optical drive.

This may be one of the unsupported modern features but if the "C" key boot does not work, try booting while holding down the Option (alt to PC users) key which hopefully will display a list of the bootable drives on the system. Select the Install CD and click the right pointing arrow. Be patient with this option it takes a while to scan all the bootable volumes.

If neither of these options work, I will have to go digging back in my memory and/or the Apple Knowledge base to find some of the other tricks used on older Macs to force them to boot from the Optical or floppy drives.

If I may be permitted a few observations about these Macs:
  • As I mentioned before, 160MB of RAM is marginal for decent performance in OS X.
  • A 6GB hard drive is marginal too but the Gossamer G3s have a limit that OS X must be on the first partition of the hard drive and that partition must be entirely contained within the first 8GB on the drive. This is a result of a quirk in the ATA-2 controllers.
  • The maximum drive size supported by these machines is 128GB because the ATA-2 controllers are limited to a 48 bit address.
  • The maximum Mac OS supported is OS X 10.2.8.
  • Have the PRAM (Parameter RAM) batteries been replaced? If not, they will need to be or they can cause all sorts of mischief.
 
Thnanks again for all your time with this. I tried the items you mentioned but to no avail. The battery as you mentioned is something I'm also suspect about do to the fact that the date and time will not stay upon reboot. I will have to find the battery and replace it and hope that does it. Do you think it is worth updating to OS X with these machines? I've seen motherboards and faster processors on ebay relatively inexpensive.
 
For what it is worth after a recent SuperDrive transplant on my wife's G4/733 Quicksilver during which I reset the CUDA button her computer would not even attempt to boot until I replaced the PRAM battery. You can get the batter at Radio Shack for $14.95. It is pretty obvious on the logic board (Macs have logic boards, not mother boards). The fact your clock is not keeping time is a dead giveaway that your PRAM battery has gone belly up.

As to whether it is worth installing OS X on these machines it is entirely dependent on how you intend to use them. They will never be particularly fast and with the limited RAM and HD space you will not have much room for applications. But as a classroom or learning machine or for basic word processing, email, and internet browsing they should be fine and OS X is so much better than OS 9 I would make the upgrade.

You mentioned logic boards on eBay. Apple logic boards are very seldom, if ever, interchangeable between different model Macs.
 
Sorry I haven't posted back. I am waiting for the battery. Local radio shack did not have it. I will keep you informed.
 
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