As I said, the HD is trashed, so I have a new one which I know to be compatible, so what do I do from here? The HD is totally unformatted, brand new, so do I need to start with another OS or no?
Set the harddrive to master.
You need to find an os 8.6 to 10.30. You need to find a full install cd. The x one is black of various designs. Grey ones are machine specific. try ebay.
Hold done the c. poweron machine with cd in drive. OS will give you an option to format the drive.
It is tray-loading, the stick under the cpu tray is unmarked, no identification which I can track at least. The upper has nothing, which is why I assumed there was no actual RAM. Also, I do not know the key commands to figure everything out.
There are two slots. i assume you find under memory.
If I do not have to upgrade the firmware first, then also I would like to know do I need to find more RAM, or how will I find out how much is in it. As I said, this is my first, so I am a little reserved at what I do.(I know, Taking it apart and examining the parts isn't too reserved).
Try booting into open firmware. Should tell you the ram on boot.
Power on your iMac while holding down command+option+o+f
printenv will tell you the amount of memory
Sometimes if volumes don't appear in Startup Manager (what you get when you hold down the Option key at startup), you need to reset the Mac's PRAM, NVRAM, and Open Firmware. Shut down the Mac, then power it up, and before the screen lights up, quickly hold down the Command, Option, P, and R keys, until the Mac has chimed twice more after the powerup chime. Then, before the screen lights up, hold down Command-Option-O-F until the Open Firmware screen appears. Then enter these lines, pressing Return after each one:
reset-nvram
set-defaults
reset-all
"The reset-all command should restart your Mac. If so, you have successfully reset the Open Firmware settings."
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1812?viewlocale=en_US
How to eject a cd from the internal cd drive:
eject cd
List of devices:
devalias
List of variables:
printenv
( nvram is the equivalent Mac OS X terminal command. )
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Resetting your Mac's PRAM and NVRAM
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379
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reset the PMU
http://mrjcd.com/junk/PMU.jpg
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Why set nvram variable? I've had open-firmware based Pegasos PPC and it simply had boot command, so instead of:
setenv boot-device ud:3,\:tbxi
should be enough to write:
boot ud:3,\:tbxi
How to boot cd from open firemware:
http://blog.litot.es/2006/03/02/boot-from-cd-in-open-firmware/