Just Bought a G4 Sawthooth

Dear David,

...I just opened it and noticed the HD was disconnected and the battery is missing. I also didn't get any manuals...

If the hard disk was disconnected, then you must have booted from an OS CD, to get the System Profiler readings...?

As per the old Sawtooth manuals, download and print these:

• Power Mac G4 (PCI & AGP): Setting Up (Manual) (.PDF download).
  
• Power Mac G4 (Gigabit Ethernet) Customer Installable Parts - Although it says "Gigabit Ethernet", most of (if not all) the instructions provided are also applicable to the older Sawtooth model. The page carries also some useful QT movies showing you step-by-step what you'll need to do.
  

...For instance, Support>Specifications says it should have SCSI, but I can't find any SCSI connections inside nor out. I'd like to find out if it's complete or if parts are missing...

SCSI hard disks were usually provided for BTC orders. The standard PowerMac Sawtooth came with just the ATA hard drive installed.

To get started with such machine and provided you want to run OS X with it, I would reccomend the following minimum actions:

1. Get a new PRAM battery in there!
   
2. Get a new, modern, Ultra ATA hard disk on your internal IDE bus, swapping out the old one: you can never trust how the previous owner has treated it's machine and you don't want all your precious data to be stored on unreliable media, do you? Besides, if that is still the stock HD the PowerMac was originally sold with, it may well be next to the end of it's life after more than 5 years of continuos computing. A nice modern 120 GB Ultra ATA hard disk with 8 MB of cache memory, will work wonders for you and will still be a nice work-horse. Don't waste your money on larger in size hard drives, as your internal IDE chip won't be able to "see" more than 120GB of formatted space.
   
3. Increase your RAM availability to at least 1GB as OSX is a rather RAM hungry Operating System. Place two new 512MB in capacity SDRAM modules and get them from a reputable vendor, such as Crucial Technology or MacGurus.
   

The above should get you going nicely.

In case you may want to look for further upgrades, please let us know what you would like to do with your new machine and what kind of applications you plan using with it.

HTH.

All the best.

Costa

The SCSI is such models is through a PCI card, and with the system Profiler saying that there are no PCI cards confirms this.

The hard disk should be relatively easy to reconnect, using the grey ribbon coming out of the motherboard just near where the HD is attached to the base of the tower. In original state, there would be only 1 HD present in the machine.

As for parts missing, the only cables that should be loose are power cables (rectangular connectors with 4 coloured wires attached), - the AirPort card should be attached to the antenna wire, so that should not be loose either. Off the top of my head I can't think of any other things that might be missing.

Hope this helps!
Laurence

I, too, would ditch the HD. However, I was steered toward a serial ATA (SATA) controller card and drive- allows for BIG capacity HD.

Apple dropped onboard SCSI support with the Blue and White G3 units. When I bought my G4 Sawtooth, we still had all SCSi peripherals, so we got a PCI SCSI card.

It was OK under system 9 but at first, I couldn't get it to work under OS X. As OS X evolved, SCSI support seemed to get better. Now I have one outboard SCSI CD reader/burner which is very handy. However, to use it, I have to put in a CD and then restart or the system won't see the drive. After that, everything works OK.

Hi David !

Got tired of fixing the Beige G3, huh?

lol

Kevin

David:

You've definitely got a AGP Graphics model Mac. The Apple codename for the AGP model is "Sawtooth". Plug your serial number in at the following link if you want to confirm for yourself:

http://www.chipmunk.nl/klantenservice/applemodel.html

Here's an Apple link where you can see the specs:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58418

Hope this clears things up a bit more for you.

Gary

David:

Dummy here accidentally deleted my previous post... glad you got the info before I did so! Your Family Number is more akin to a generic, physical configuration description than a specific Mac model identifier. (My Blue & White G3 is also listed as in the M5183 model series!). Apple had some real growing pains when the AGP was first released, due to the erratum problem and 450Mhz limitation, which ticked-off a lot of folks, as I recall. I believe that they honored early orders for the 500Mhz models by shipping 450Mhz ones with extra RAM to appease the user base. They eventually got it sorted out and speed bumped the processors back to 500Mhz, which they later shipped, so you may have one of the real 500Mhz ones. (Your Mac is one that is remembered in the annals of one of the more embarrassing periods in Apple's history!)

There are folks here with a lot of knowledge and experience in upgrading AGPs, so I'd prefer to defer to their recommendations and just remind you to check to insure that your firmware is up-to-date on the Mac before installing OSX:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120068

Since you mentioned RAM, that is
b always
a good way to get a significant and cost-effective performance boost from a pre-G5 computer (some G5 owners can overdo it with 8GB of RAM, but that's another topic...).

Regarding monikers, just type in "Gary", which is a heck-of-a-lot easier! 🙂

Gary

David:

Don't panic yet. You initialized the Maxtor with Tiger Disk Utility and formatted it as Mac OS extended, checking the box to install the OS9 drivers, correct?

The gray screen thing means the Mac couldn't find a system to load. The second "thing" with the arrows sounds like an abberation of the Startup Manager (which is normally not on a blue screen, as far as I know), which looks for bootable systems and then shows them above the arrows if it finds any. If there were no systems shown above these arrows, it didn't find any.

This typically means that either the drive was jumpered incorrectly or attached to the wrong connector on the ribbon cable, or that the startup memory needs to be reset/retaught where to look for the boot drive(s).

If you're certain that the jumper setting is correctly set for master with the pins jumpered vertically across the leftmost two pins (nearest ones to the ribbon cable pins), and if you have the drive attached to the end connector on the ribbon cable, then reseat the cables and do a PMU reset:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=95037

You could do a PRAM reset and open firmware NVRAM reset, but the PMU reset does both of these and is generally most effective.

A couple of things... are you installing from the original installation disks that were shipped with this Mac? If not, what are you using? (Say Tiger). Regarding the firmware update, if you're uncertain whether it's up to date, just run it (from OS9). If the Mac is already updated, it will advise you when you attempt it.

Gary

David:

Regarding OSX and OS9 installation, you can install them on separate partitions or together on the same volume. Operationally, it makes no difference. It's true that there would be two system folders on a single volume installation, but the two systems are worlds apart and will not conflict with each other. I'd keep them separated as they are, initially at least, for a bit more clarity. It may also help down the line, if one volume gets messed up with directory problems and you can't boot to it with either system. You can then boot from the system on the other volume to take a look.

Gary