iMac Rev. B Nightmares
From Seann Giffin:
I'm trying to get a Rev. B
Bondi revived, and I'm having some issues. It will only read an
OS 9 or higher CD, and if I partition the hard drive, it generates
a scrolling error.
I only have one, so there's no abundance of spare parts, and I live
in a small Canadian town in the Niagara Region, so there isn't a
surplus of used iMacs or parts.
I'm trying to install OS 8.6, and I've had an enormous amount of
trouble doing so! I won't bore you with all the details, but if you
want the history, it's all in the Apple
Discussion Forums.
Any help or insight you have would help me a lot!
Thanks!
Seann (EvilSupahFly) Giffin
Sean,
Thanks for sharing the link to the Apple forum. It
sounds like you've got the iMac from Hell, and it looks like you're
taking the right steps.
I only just learned that the classic Mac OS can have
problems with partitions larger than 8 GB. Until now, I only knew
of it an an OS X problem. To play it safe, we now suggest making
the first format 7 GB, and you have to install whatever version of
the Mac OS you want to use on the first partition. OS X won't let
you install to a bigger partition on these iMacs, but OS 8.x and 9.x
won't stop you. Problem is, if any System files end up past the
8 GB mark, you could end up with an unbootable Mac, so if your
hard drive is bigger than 7 GB, you should partition it so the
first partition is no bigger than 7 GB to avoid this problem.
You should be able to run any version of the Mac OS
from 8.5.1 through 10.4.x, but you'll have to use either an iMac
installer for 8.5.1/8.6 or a universal install CD. If your installer is
for something different, such an an iBook, PowerBook, or Power Mac,
that could explain your problems. Also, your keyboard problems will
probably be best solved with a new keyboard - PC USB keyboards will
work and are dirt cheap, although some of the marking are a bit
different.
You've already covered the hard drive and firmware in
the Apple forum.
Finally, there's bound to be someone with a similar
Mac in the area - St. Catharines, Niagara Falls, Welland, Port Colbone,
Fort Erie (my roots are in the area, but all of my relatives seem to be
Windows users). Maybe ask around on our
Mac Canada list.
Dan
Actually, it boots as long as the hard drive is not
partitioned. As soon as I do that, it breaks, even if the first is less
than 8 GB.
The drive itself is a 60 GB. The OS 9 CD is a universal and can see
the whole thing. The other CDs are OS 8, 8.1, and 8.6 universal
installs as well, but the thing won't read them.
I'm tempted to give up on it and just hit up eBay or something.
Of course, not owning a car makes part sourcing difficult, but I
thank you for your advice!
Seann,
I'm definitely stumped by this one: You can only boot
from an OS 9 CD, nothing earlier, and not if the hard drive is
partitioned. Very strange.
Dan
My wife wants me to give it up, and I sometimes want to, but part of
me won't go down without a fight and this is turning into a fight I
can't win.
My pride won't let me give up.
Early G3 Mac 8 GB First Partition Issue
Dear Dan:
The 8 GB limitation that exists on older Macs may be a limitation of
Open Firmware. I mean, on NewWorld Macs the Mac OS ROM file is read
using Open Firmware, also all Macs read the BootX file when booting Mac
OS X by using Open Firmware.
Yuhong Bao
Interesting thought, but this only seems to impact
early G3 Macs, not pre-G3 PCI Macs that would also have Open Firmware.
Of course, it could be that nobody noticed the problem because hard
drives were a lot smaller in those days.
Dan
Thousands vs. Millions of Colors
From William R. Walsh:
I saw your response and
link to a blog posting stating that running with thousands instead
of millions of colors could make a video card run faster and cause a
Macintosh to use less resources. I don't have any benchmark results to
offer, but I can suggest that reducing the color depth on an older Mac
with older graphics hardware will result in a very obvious performance
increase.
The more colors your video card has to display, the more work your
video card's GPU and supporting components must do. On newer cards the
issue of color depth is a moot point - a new video card running at
thousands of colors won't be much if any faster than it is at millions
of colors. But older cards with more limited processing speed and
memory/RAMDAC bandwidth will pick up in speed if they don't have to
display as many colors. The amount of picture data would likely remain
the same, but the amount of color data decreases, which causes video
memory and GPU utilization to go down . . . sometimes quite
dramatically.
In the days of video cards that were little more than dumb
framebuffers, reducing the amount of picture and color data that had to
be shuffled around could free up some CPU resources. But nearly all
relatively new (within the last ~8 years or so) video cards have at
least some form of onboard acceleration.
I think the advice offered on the blog posting is targeted primarily
at users of old Macintosh systems and video cards. It would be true no
matter what version of the Mac OS is in use. It won't make much
difference on newer systems or video cards. It's a good, free trick to
try if you want to squeeze just a little more performance out of an
older Mac with older video hardware - just about everything will look
pretty much the same even with thousands of colors available instead of
millions.
William
William,
That blog specifically addresses Leopard users, and a
lot of the author's comments don't make any sense to me. He says that
changing to thousands frees up RAM, which isn't true of any Mac,
vampire video or dedicated. He says it impacts swap memory, which it
would only do if it impacted RAM usage - but vampire video on Intel
Macs uses a fixed amount of system RAM.
He goes on to say that he's running Leopard on a
1.67 GHz PowerBook, which probably
only displays 18-bit color to begin with, so he's not going to see any
real difference on his display - but the PowerBooks had dedicated video
processors and video memory. As I said, it's very confusing that he
talks about things that simply aren't relevant to any modern Mac.
I can imagine that a Pismo or an early Power Mac G4 with ATI Rage Pro video might
be snappier with 16-bit graphics, but in no case is it going to have
any impact on system memory usage or swap space.
Dan
Leopard on Unsupported Power Macs
From Adam Potts:
I have Leopard currently running on 2 of my 3 unsupported Macs.
The first is 800 MHz Quicksilver
[with] a single stick of 512 (so the 2nd computer would be more
usable). Video is ATI Rage 128 Pro, 16 MB, built in year 2000, Core
Image listed as "Software", and Quartz Extreme is not supported.
Installed via hacked installer (changed a simple No to a Yes and burned
a new DVD, should be able to install on any G4 with the correct
firmware) straight to the internal drive via a $30 off-the-shelf DVD
internal burner. Running two internal drives, 30 GB Quantum Fireball
(OEM Apple drive) and a 20 GB Western Digital.
All apps requiring Core Image don't seem to work (correctly): Front
Row works, but has no video, will play audio though. I haven't tried
Time Machine, as all my files are stored on my B&W 350 MHz G3 which is set up as a
server running Tiger and using Sharepoints. DVD Player does
work, as does VLC, though VLC will sometimes drop frames, especially if
there's anything else running.
Computer 2 is Dual 450 MHz G4 (it
may be an upgrade, the computer was obtained for free from my work, and
I don't ask too many questions when people are handing me free stuff,
other than "does it work?") with 1.12 GB RAM. Video is ATI Radeon 7500,
32 MB, built in year 2001, Core Image support is listed as "Software",
Quartz Extreme is supported, 2nd video card is PCI ATI Rage 128, 16 MB
Core Image also listed as "Software", Quartz Extreme is not supported.
Both video cards are driving 19" Acer LCDs at 1280 x 1024 @ 75 Hz
Installation was the same as above, off-the-shelf DVD burner straight
to internal drive using hacked install DVD. Running 2 internal drives.
Seagate 250 GB Partitioned into 30 GB boot disk and 200+GB file storage
disk. System profiler lists it as 128 GB capacity, but it recognizes
and uses all the available space anyway. 2nd drive is Western Digital
40 GB. As far as apps go, the same things work and don't work on both
computers.
Both computers run significantly faster than they did running Tiger.
I also don't have problems with them hanging on restarts anymore, and
the 450 will even wake up from sleep, which neither would do under
Tiger. I haven't tried putting the Quicksilver to sleep, as I've had it
busy ripping my DVDs to the server since installing Leopard, though
when it fell asleep during the install process, it hung, and I had to
restart. The graphics on both computers seem to be a bit choppy at
times, though not any more than Tiger was. Overall, Leopard seems to be
much more stable than Tiger ever was, and even loaded down with running
apps is faster than a fresh install of Tiger.
To date, Leopard has been the most pleasant computing experience
I've ever had. The only downside (other than apps requiring Core Image)
is the complete lack of any easy way to input data into iCal (what? no
drawer? it was ugly, but at least it was useful). The upside to not
having a Core Image capable video card is I have an opaque menu bar by
default. It's also fun to play around with the Dock files to get rid of
that ugly grey thing that comes standard.
I did not even attempt to install Leopard on my G3, as from what
I've read, the actual processor architecture isn't supported or can't
handle it. Plus there's a lot of valuable data on there I don't want to
lose.
Adam,
Thanks for the field report. I'm planning on digging
my G4/450 dual out of storage soon, loading it up with every version of
OS X I can lay my hands on (I have the Public Preview and versions
10.0 through 10.4 at present), and leaving a partition for Leopard as
well. I plan to make it a testbed where I can play with memory
configurations, swap out video cards, etc. without worrying about
messing up my main computer, a G4/1 GHz dual. It's good to read how
well Leopard runs on such old hardware.
Dan
Leopard on PowerBook 550 and eMac 700
From Richard Jordan:
Hi Dan
A while ago I wrote in and told you of my experience installing and
using Leopard on a PowerBook Ti
550. I have since then installed Leopard on an eMac 700 MHz and have been running both now
since the middle of October.
I thought I would give you an update on their Leopard usage and, to
be honest, they work very well. Both are running 10.5.1, and although a
little slower (as you illustrated in the benchmarks you sent me) they
are perfectly usable . . . however . . . there are
some limitations:
The eMac and the PowerBook will no longer allow video chats through
iChat. iChat does not see the external iSight camera as able to run
video chats; it will however let you use it's internal mic for audio.
This is very weird, as under Tiger, the eMac and PowerBook handled
these video chats perfectly. If you have a solution for this, I'd love
to hear it - it's one thing that I really do miss.
Another issue is neither machine can use the screen share feature
over iChat with a Mac mini
2 GHz Core Duo running Leopard, I'm not sure why, as I can
screen share over a network from the PowerBook to the Mac mini. I can
then connect to the same Mac mini using an iBook 1.2 GHz and iChat over the
Internet, so I know it's not down to my Internet line. Looks like iChat
really is built around compatible machines and not just updated
code.
One major issue I have found on the eMac is it's graphics card from
time to time locks up coming out of a screen saver. I am guessing this
it a limitation of the graphics card and Leopard's Core Graphics
libraries. A forced restart with the power button is the only way to
reboot.
Apart from that, everything seems to be fine, and the only thing I
really miss is video chatting in iChat, which I would love to fix.
Cheers
Richard
Richard,
Thanks for the update. Apple has an extensive guide
for troubleshooting the iSight camera, but since it works in Tiger
but not in Leopard, it doesn't seem it would be a hardware problem.
Perhaps connecting the iSight webcam after Leopard is running will
help.
I haven't got a copy of Leopard yet, but I've done a
little Googling. Ted
Landau notes on MacFixIt that for screen sharing to work, both Macs
must be running Leopard, must be running iChat, and must have Bonjour
enabled if they're on the same local network. No idea why Screen
Sharing is failing, but it might have to do with older, less powerful
graphics processors.
You're the second to report lockup problems with the
first generation eMac. The other reader said that if his eMac goes to
sleep, the only solution is to power it down and start it up again.
Maybe that's part of the reason Apple didn't support 700-800 MHz
Macs.
Dan
Leopard Running on Dual 800 G4 Power Mac
From Terral Cochran:
I installed via Target Disk Mode from a Quad G5
What unsupported Mac(s) have you installed it on? G4 Dual 800
How much RAM? 1.5 GB
How fast a CPU, and what brand, if it's an upgrade? Stock
What video card does your Mac have? Nvidia GeForce 2
Twinview
Which installation method did you use, a modified installer or
installing from a supported Mac? Installed to internal drive on G4
via Target Disk mode.
Dan Knight has been publishing Low
End Mac since April 1997. Mailbag columns come from email responses to his Mac Musings, Mac Daniel, Online Tech Journal, and other columns on the site.
