Got a hold of a Power Macintosh G3 AIO, it needs a lot of love. Currently not booting, need some advice.

Oh, how time flies! I still have two working Beige G3 Mini Towers, one heavily upgraded.

Glad you mentioned the Royal VR—I'd forgotten that foible.

...reset CUDA, CUDA button works too, pressed once turns off the unit.

You need to do that differently. On "Old World ROM" Macs like the Molar, the proper CUDA reset was

• computer off
• press and hold the CUDA for 20-30 seconds
• release.

The important momentary press did not apply until the "New World ROM" Macs, basically those with logic board USB ports. The Beige G3 series was the last of the Old World models.

You've done almost all the things to try in a no-start situation. Did you physically remove the personality card and clean contacts before reseating? The P-card was the usual suspect in many startup failures. Secured only at one end and subjected to years of vibration, the unsupported end could work its way partially out of the slot and you get failures to start. It could also "act" seated even though the unsupported end was not fully down. It's worht a second look.

Do you have bootable optical disks? The 1/2 3.6vAA PRAM batteries are getting hard to find, and I worry that any still inventoried have died of old age. A Beige G3 will boot to a dark screen in the presence off a dead OR WEAK Pram batt. Do you have Bootable optical disks? I found yhat many older Macs would boot to an optical disk when they would not boot from the HDD due to battery issue.

Sound like fun stuff.

I was hoping to get a response from you, most of the troubleshoot steps I found were from an old post from 2016 where you helped someone. Glad you’re here!

Thank you. Oh yes, I'm nothing if not durable. It was wanting to learn more about my Beige G3 MT that first brought me here about 2000. However, I suspect Jeff has the better memory! He's awesome.

Jeff makes a good point about the disks. Those models used System Enablers, small files that are specific to a model, and sometimes to a sub-model. There were THREE disks for the Beige series, on for each logic board revision. What appears to be a supported OS version but is the install/restore disk for another Mac model, it won't have the proper enablers. A full retail install disk does.

I hope Jeff can help my aging memory of these:

I recall the system install/restore disks for the Rev A Beiges were white, the Rev B and C were blue.

I recall the Molars, introduced later in April 1998, were Rev B and C only.

There is an on-board slot for VRAM. Base was 2MB; my G3/300 MT shipped with 6MB, the max for that slot.

I found an old MacGurus logic board diagram for the Molar:

PERCH is the slot for the personality card.

In addition to Allan's suggestions, I think I should ask the obvious - is the ROM card installed? It's a tight fit, so if you removed it, did you reinstall it by pressing down firmly and make sure that it's fully-seated? I used a soft, white eraser (not a ball point pen eraser) to clean/polish discoloration from the gold-plated pins on all cards and blew off all traces of rubber shavings before reinstalling. I didn't attempt to clean the slots. Is the jumper at J28 installed across the pins marked MAC? The recommended procedure for resetting the CUDA was to first unplug the computer, remove the battery, disconnect the power supply cable from the motherboard, press the CUDA Reset button, wait at least 10 minutes before reinstalling the battery (observing correct polarity), and then try starting the computer. As for getting batteries, that same 3.6-volt ½AA lithium battery is used in alarm system components, so unlike the 4.5-volt alkaline batteries used in the old Performas, it shouldn't be difficult to find. It's best to buy from a large battery retailer that should (hopefully) have a rotating inventory. As a word of caution, exploring the upper portion of the computer to troubleshoot the startup problem poses the risk for severe electrical shock, because contact with the high voltage anode lead and/or flyback transformer can be a life-altering experience. If the OS 8.1 install disk that you have isn't the white or blue one specifically marked for the A-I-Os or isn't the retail version of OS 8.1, you will likely have problems using it as a source for booting.

Thanks, Allan. At this point, I think it's a collaborative effort when it comes to combining the minutia that we absorbed through the years. Tips like using EDO memory (rather then FPM) with a 2K refresh rate in a Power Mac 6500 have become arcane fragments of early-Power Mac knowledge that will likely never need to be explained again. Regarding your 3 points:

(1) Yes, initially the OS 8/8.1 system installation disks for the G3 desktop and mini-tower models were white. In early-1998, probably about the time that the Rev. B ROM was introduced, they began shipping 2 different "blue" disks, one for the desktop/mini-tower and the other for the All-in-One. This may have been done to avoid confusion with the white retail OS 8/8.1 disks. OS 8.5 was the latest version that shipped on a beige G3's "blue" installation disk.

(2) The Revision B ROM (77D$45F1) was released in February 1998, so unless an I. T. guy at a school replaced the motherboard and/or the ROM card in an A-I-O, it should have either a Revision B or C (77D$45F2) ROM.

(3) The onboard SGRAM slot accommodated ATI's 2 MB or 4 MB SO-DIMM, increasing the onboard graphics memory from the default 2 MBs to 4 or 6 MBs. In addition to requiring the Personality card with the DVD decoder chip, early versions of the hardware-based Apple DVD Player program required that the display for those G3s (primarily the mini-towers) be connected to the onboard DB-15 graphics port. That's when the upgrade to 6 MBs of SGRAM was worth the investment.

As for users who are just now experimenting with a 25 year-old beige or B&W G3, thanks to the Web Archive, the now-defunct section of Accelerate Your Mac's website - "The G3 Zone" - can be researched for the treasure trove of information that it provided us.