Beige G3 All of a sudden won't boot up

Grant:
I'd so love to know what the 'creeping crud' is; my gut sense is that OSX is somehow involved in this. So something is being installed and that something causes functions to be "re-routed" (not in the physical sense, but more of a miscommunication sense) or disrupted. Kinda like the computer on too much caffeine or too much alcohol.

Maybe it is XPF? I always find it odd that when I have this problem, I can only boot the hard drive when I hold down the option-c key. That's the combination that normally allows me to re-route a restart from the 1st partition to the 2nd or visa-versa.

A.

Hi Brian C
I don't know if this will work, but your problem in interisting. When you first started you had 2 drives master/slave Now you have one drive, some drives have different setting for master w/slave attatched, and another setting for single drive no slave. I would check your drive settings and go from there, hope this helps. Bill J

Brian:
Actually, the scenario you describe is exactly what I've experienced. You "used" to have OSX on there, that is the key. I think that OSX is leaving something behind.

At the moment, my Beige is down, awaiting an ATA controller card for a 200Gb drive. No OSX is currently installed, but it was on the previous drive I had in there. The new drive has OS9 installed on the second parition. In order to get the drive to boot to 9, I have to hold down the option-C key. Otherwise, I get a dark screen, a green light on the monitor that then switches to orange and silence... A period of mulitple reboots, zapping the PRAM, resetting the cuda and doing an nvram-reset has seemed to resolve the problem.

A.

The problem, similar to what I have been seeing and what Admiral has been seeing, is that something bad is written on your hard drive. It could be a damaged driver, damaged "wrapper file", invalid pointer to System File or invalid System file, damaged partition map, corrupted fonts in Mac OS 9 (also used indirectly by Mac OS X), or other things we never though of.

There is one key combination you can try. The whole charade is detailed in this old article:

16697 -- Macintosh: Shortcut Does Not Prevent Hard Disk Mounting (2/95)

The movie version: clear the PRAM with Command Option P R then immediately hold down Command Option Shift Delete in an attempt to get the Hard Drive NOT to mount.

If it boots up from the CD with the Hard Drive spun up, but not mounted, you are almost home. Then you can try "update Driver", run Disk First Aid, Use Disk Warrior, install/reinstall the Mac OS, or just initialize it.

There is one more desperation move that old hackers like me have tried, but it is a little riskier. They hint at it in the article above.

Connect the Hard drive in the usual way, but disconnect the Molex power connector at the drive. Arrange your Mac so that you can boot it with the covers off. (Don't worry, any dangerous voltages require tools to get to them.)

Start up from the CD. When everything is booted up and all CD activity is done, reconnect the power cable at your Hard Drive. The drive should spin up, but usually does not mount. Run Drive Setup. With luck, the drive will appear on the list, and you can "Update Driver". Now try to figure out what's wrong with it using Disk First Aid, other Disk Utilities, or just initialize it.

You should not plug/replug the data cable with the power on.

When you say the Mac dies immediately when the drive is plugged in, do you mean in 0.1 second? that could mean power problems, a concept I had not considered.

... or in under 10 seconds, which may mean that the driver is corrupted, and when you go to load it, the Mac crashes. If this is the case, having the Drive Setup window already open may keep the Mac from trying to load the driver and mount the drive.

Hey all... I'm late into this game here and I too, have been getting the exact syptoms as you all have explained here. I got this beige 266mhz desktop and when out of the blue, some application would just quit on me and the system would like go dark. With a soft reboot, nothing happens except that I can hear it restarting but the screen stays black. I've only got Jaguar 10.2.8 installed and the only way I can get this to boot back up is to hold down the X key upon starting from cold boot for about a good minute or so and then OS X begins to load back up.

I've read in some places where others have used a disk utility software called "Disk Warrior" to fix a damaged wrapper file. I've also heard from MacFixIt where File Sharing files that has become corrupted will effect boot up as well because of some sort of network reasons back in the OS 9 days. And if you disconnect any network cables, you may be able to get past this so you could delete the proper files as mentioned in the previous post(s) here, and yes there is 2 files involved as stated as well. I on the other hand cannot seem to be able to boot from a cd anymore. I've been trying to re-install OS 9, but have yet to get a successful boot from CD alone. I thought about reformatting the drive as well, but from what I also have been reading along here it seems that doesn't resolve the issues so I guess I'm not going to waste my time reformatting.

If anybody has any other suggestions on how I can get OS 9 back on, or get to the main issue at hand why the beige G3 has a hard time booting up past dark screen please keep posting away.

Grant,

Thanx 4 the Apple documentation on pulling the power plug on a hard drive. Not that Apple offers it as a recommended proceedure, they do not give their usual warranty voided language!

Sad note, tho; "NOTE: This process does not work with the Quadra 700." Fortunately, that is still my most reliable Mac of all time.

Jim