I've been working with a couple of old Power Macs over the past week while Low End Mac has been on hiatus, and I've been frustrated more than once.
The two models are a Power Mac G4/450 dual and a Blue & White Power Mac G3/350. The problems have been all over the map - memory, hard drives, keyboards, mice, and operating systems. I'll cover them in no particular order.
Apple did a great job designing the enclosures for these computers. The "drawbridge" access to their interiors is brilliant, but there's a problem when you put them on the floor - which is the norm for tower computers. The problem? The USB cables on Apple's mice and keyboards is too short. You need to use a hub, third-party keyboard and mouse, or get a USB extender (which shipped with these computers originally, but I acquired them used).
Another problem is that the black Apple Pro Keyboard has a built-in USB hub that Mac OS 9.x doesn't recognize and won't support. Weird, since earlier Apple USB keyboards had hubs that worked just fine.
When I tried to use one of those earlier USB keyboards, I discovered that the cable on one is bad, and the other one doesn't respond when you press the A key. Sigh.
I have a Mac OS 9.0 install CD, as well as OS 9.1 and 9.2.1 update CDs. Problem is, the Power Mac G4 refused to let me install 9.0, even though the computer officially supports Mac OS 8.6 and later. Without a 9.1 or 9.2 installer, I was stuck. (I had a stripped down version of 9.2.2 on both of these Power Macs, but it was missing a lot of components. I was doing a fresh install to get them on my hard drives.)
I finally gave up on the G4 and moved to the older, slower G3, which I've never been able to get working reliably in Mac OS X 10.3 or later. I have three partitions on the hard drive: one with a stripped version of 9.2.2, one that had 10.3 on it, and an empty "work" partition. My solution was to install Mac OS 9.0 on the second partition, after erasing it and wiping off OS X. It booted just fine, but for some reason it wouldn't let me run the 9.1 update.
Tip: Open the Speech Control Panel, select Spoken Alerts, and turn them off (they're on by default). There's something a bit spooky about having your Mac speak to you when you didn't explicitly enable that feature.
I then ran the available updates, used DiskCopy to make a Read-only (but not compressed) disk image of the updated 9.0 installation on the third partition, and then found the 9.0.4 update on Apple's website. Neither Internet Explorer 4.5 nor Netscape 4.6 worked well with apple.com, so I ended up downloading iCab 3.0.3 for the Classic Mac OS. That let me download the 9.0.4 update, which ran just fine.
Tip: If you're making clean versions of the Mac OS so you can archive them, rename the partition for whatever version of the Mac OS you've installed. When you create the disk image, it will be given the name of your partition by default.
After rebooting and running Software Update, I made another disk image and then inserted the 9.1 update CD. This time it ran without a hitch. And after rebooting and installing updated, I made yet another disk image.
Finally, I ran the 9.2.1 update (which required 9.1), used Software Update to get to 9.2.2 and apply any other updates, and made my fourth disk image. Now I have disk images of Mac OS 9.0, 9.0.4, 9.1, and 9.2.2 just in case I ever need them.
Tip: Turn off Virtual Memory (VM) before making a disk image. In my case, with 384 MB of RAM installed, it reduced the size of disk images by 385 MB.
For the record, these disk image files are 210.3 MB, 221.6 MB, 233.8 MB, and 249.3 MB, respectively, for a full installation of Mac OS 9.0, 9.0.4, 9.1, and 9.2.2 plus iCab 3.0.3, the only additional software I installed before making these disk images. With virtual memory turned off and the default disk cache (8160 KB or 8 MB), Mac OS 9.0 uses 43.7 MB of RAM at startup, 9.0.4 uses 45.6 MB, 9.1 uses 49.1 MB, and 9.2.2 uses 49.2 MB. (With VM on, these numbers drop 12-14 MB, and by reducing the disk cache, you could run Mac OS 9 on a 32 MB Mac, but that's cutting things mighty close. And you'll definitely want a drive larger than 250 MB.)
Tip: If you have a CD-RW drive, Combo drive, or SuperDrive, you can use Disk Burner in Mac OS 9.1 and later to create a bootable CD using these steps:
Now I finally have a CD that should boot the Power Mac G4 into Mac OS 9.2.2.
Both of these computers have been very troublesome, particularly with OS X, so they've been set aside for quite a while. After a lot of trial and error, I've determined that my problems stemmed from mixed memory modules - different brands, different speeds, different capacities, different types of RAM (222 and 322, whatever that means), and even some error correcting (ECC) RAM in the G4. No wonder these machines were flaking out!
I have all four memory banks filled in both Macs, but the Blue & White G3 is down to 384 MB at present - one 256 MB DIMM (type 222) and two 64 MB ones (one 322, one unmarked). They're all the same type, and Mac OS 9.2.2 has been running reliably for hours.
Of course, one of the bugaboos about Mac OS X is that it's far pickier about RAM than the Classic Mac OS ever was. I can't fathom why this should be, but it is. Back in the early days of OS X, this was a real nightmare for some users who had replaced their Apple RAM with higher capacity, lower cost third-party RAM - and then discovered after installing OS X that their Mac no longer worked.
At this point, I think I'm going to warn people of the dangers of randomly mixing memory in Macs that are going to be running Mac OS X - and even the Classic Mac OS, after last week's headaches. I've had the Blue & White G3 running under Mac OS 9.x for two days without a problem since removing the unmatched memory.
Tip: When upgrading memory in an older Mac, seriously consider replacing all of the installed RAM with new RAM - and be sure to buy identical modules to avoid problems due to speed differences, speed, and other ratings. (Apple recommends 322 memory.)
As I write this paragraph, I've installed Mac OS X 10.0.3 "Cheetah" and run Software Update twice to get up-to-date with 10.0.4 and a few other things. Almost everything worked perfectly (the only glitch: it wouldn't recognize my black Apple Pro USB Keyboard connected to a hub, so I had to stretch its short cable to the back of the computer on the floor), and I had hoped to clone my 10.0.4 installation to an external FireWire drive, but nether Carbon Copy Cloner nor SuperDuper works with 10.0.4 - CCC 2.3 requires Mac OS X 10.2 or later, and SuperDuper calls for 10.3.9 or later. I haven't been able to locate earlier versions that might work with 10.0.x or 10.1.x.
Not that there's really a lot of sense keeping 10.0.4 installed, as there's very little software that works with it. Even the the erstwhile iCab 3.0.3, which can run under Mac OS 8.5, requires 10.1 "Puma" or later in its OS X version. So I'm upgrading to 10.1, and after I've run all the updaters, I'll make a disk image that I can use later on to clone 10.1.x to an external FireWire drive using a version of OS X supported by CCC and/or SuperDuper.
In one of those great ironies, I'm doing all of this on a Blue & White Power Mac G3, a model that has FireWire but doesn't support booting from FireWire. However, neither of my G4 Power Macs can run the Mac OS 9.0 installer, so I had to start my work from this machine.
Once that's done, it will be "Jaguar" time, getting Mac OS X 10.2 installed and updated. And then on to 10.3 "Panther" and 10.4 "Tiger". At that point it will be time to get back to work on the Power Mac G4/450 dual.
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