Q: iBook G3 Corrupted OS X
I have an iBook G3 with firewire and that is about all I can tell you. When I bought it off of ebay it came running Mac OS 9.2. Stupid me decided that I should take a copy of Mac OS X off of an iMac G3 and copy that to the HDD of the iBook. I then attempted to boot off of the OS X folder I put on my HDD. The system immediately kernel panicked. Both OS 9 and OS X are on the same partition so i need to somehow set OS 9 as the startup disk. I have looked at numerous other forums (I have been trying to fox this for about a year now) and found commands for doing this in Open Firmware. The command was:
boot hd:\wherever your installation is\
It did start booting OS 9 but just hung there and never fully booted.
Is there any way to delete something off of the HDD with open firmware? If I could delete the OS X folder that should solve my problem. Another possible fix would be force booting into OS 9. How would you do this?
I have tried resetting the nvram, pram, holding option on startup, and holding 9 on startup.
I do not own the restore CD and am afraid to buy them because I do not know which ones I need. Are they the orange ones? Could somebody link them please? I do not own any other mac with a cd burner so I have to use Windows to burn cd's. I found this program called TransMac which let me make a bootable disc for my iMac G3. I tried to make an OS 9 disc but the iBook refused to boot it.
Any suggestions are welcome!
Thanks in advanced!
iBook, iOS 9.2
Posted on Feb 14, 2016 3:36 PM
As the other article indicates,
Mac OS: Versions, builds included with PowerPC Macs (since 1998) - Apple Support
Your model came with 9.0.4 and no Mac OS X version.
There is also another caveat though before you can even upgrade to Mac OS X 10.2 or later.
Mac OS X: Available firmware updates - Apple Support
That firmware update can be found here:
Now it may not install unless you get 9.1, or 9.2.1 retail. Regardless of which operating system you get for Mac OS 9, the installer disc must look like:
And not say Update, Upgrade, Dropin, or OEM on it. It must say 9.1 or 9.2.1 in black on one side.
Once you have the correct disc, you can download the updates from
9.1 to 9.2.1 to 9.2.2 from here:
http://ftp.iinet.net.au/pub/apple/US/Macintosh/System/
And try the firmware above each time you progress a step higher if needed.
Once your firmware is updated, then you can install either 10.3 or 10.4 retail as this tip explains:
Posted on Feb 18, 2016 4:31 PM
