Mac OS9 On G3 ibook Clamshell 466mhz

[LillyOmegaWolf]

Hi there everyone

Ive run into a problem installing OS9 on my iBook G3 and looking around the web for the past few hours has not fixed the issue.

After having fun with OS9 on my 466mhz powermac G4 I decided it was time to get myself the mac I had wished I owned as a kid. The clamshel G3. Most specifically the lime green one.
as a side note, I used "Mac OS 9.2.2 Universal Install - ISO CD Image for all G3s & G4s (Most Popular)"  as the installer for my G4 powermac and it continues to run nice and fast with no tweaks yet as I had been planning on using its install to clone to the clamshell.

I'm trying to install Mac OS9 on my ibook G3 466mhz. It's a lovely green clamshell i got off ebay last year and it sadly only came with tiger installed. However, since they are rare, I decided it should be easy enough to 'downgrade' mac OSX.
So Now I've gone and installed 512meg of ram, and put in an OWC SSD 120gb drive. I formatted it with OS9 drivers, 101gb for OS9 and I put mac os 10.2.8 on the partition 10gb secondary partition. I put 10.2.8 on because I wanted something to talk to my network of other newer macs and it was the OSX I used in intermediate school after having used system 7 so theres memories there. I also like its finders look more than Tiger even though its very lacking in many ways and support online makes me feel its a dead OS.

Using OSX I copied os9 from my G4 using my network. Mac OS boot manager found OS9 and has allowed me to set it as my boot drive. All should be fine because its the universal OS9 right?
Well, it got stuck loading. Load bar gets a smidgen of the way across, I don't even think its loaded any extensions and it just hangs. I hold down shift to try and help but again, it doesnt seem to reach that bit of the loading so no help. Spinning ball turns into a bomb and it just continues to hang with that about 1/5th of the bar loaded till I restart it.
Why would that not work? OSx won't let me delete the system folder on the OS9 partition as it seems to know what that is.
So i try the universal drag and drop installer on here for 9.2.2 and gave it what seemed to be a (unesecary?) fresh install.
Still hangs in the same spot when I try and load OS9.

So i try the 9.2.1 installer CD image, burn the disk on my High Sierra hackintosh in toast to a old CD.
I see happy mac, Load bar appears, then stops before it makes it more than half a centermeter accross the screen, even worse than the previous two attempts.
So I try the 9.1 universal disk and same thing happens. CD seems to have burned fine and all...  but again no joy.
So i hunt around the net as this forum doesnt have the CD specific to the clamshell 466mhz and eventually find the 9.0.4 installer for the clamshell G3 firewire (thats my ibook 466 im pretty sure) but that too stops just as the bar starts to load.

What could be going on with this ibook thats preventing OS9 from loading? I've always been able to clone OS from one mac to another...

What worries me is this clamshell has got a busted Firewire 400 port (the auction didn't mention that.... I'm not happy with that as I had been counting on FW400.) and Ive removed its wifi card as that's super old. Its modem is also busted and removed. It's headphone jack also gives only static. Honestly, if I had known about all these issues, I would not have bothered with the auction...
But here it is, its mine... I would like to make something of it, even if all that winds up running is OS9. I have enough macs running Snow Leopard and Tiger to not need anymore OSX but I'm not sure that 10.2.8 is the problem here as even CD installs are not wanting to load.
Whats really dumb, I can run Classilla on the web in classic mode using my OS9 drive as the system folder and apps folder. OS9 (such as it is within X) loads fine in 10.2.8 ... What is going on....?

As a extra note, I had to hunt for the CD image because this ibook was given to me with the legit CD installer for the 300mhz non-firewire clamshell.
So...
I would love to get Mac OS9 working on it as it would probably become my main OS9 mac.
Any ideas?

[GaryN]

Any ideas, you ask?
My first and foremost idea id that you've got multiple variables all working at once and you've got to eliminate them one by one.
A G3 with known and possibly unknown issues, no working Firewire to test-boot over, an SSD of untested compatibility (yeah, it should work but untested still) and a boot sequence that hangs in basically the same spot no matter what.

I would first eliminate the SSD as a problem by reinstalling the old drive and see if OS9 will "take" on that.
Second (and hopefully someone else can help here, 'cause I may be completely out to lunch on this) I have a vague memory of issues developing long ago when installing early OSX (Jaguar?) anywhere but at the "top" of the drive, i.e. the first 10Gb.

There may be other causes specific to your particular model that others will note, but I think you really should start with the SSD…it just feels like the likely culprit.

[LillyOmegaWolf]

Ok. Thanks for your reply.
I had thought the SSD would be okay, since it was from OWC and all but I guess I can rip this thing apart again and reinstall its 80gb HDD.
It's just so many layers to get to the drive....
You think the SSD would be screwing with the CD installers loading too? Because it's the fact that my various burned CDs all fail to load past that very start too which confuses me.

10.2 I could try cloning it to the first partition and see if that helps too. Or I could delete it and try just OS9 if that might make any difference?

This mac was (aside from the no firewire) running 10.4.11 okay, slowly since its not all that powerful, but okay before I tore it apart so I would hope that the rest of it is in good enough condition to at least run OS9.

[GaryN]

Well, you don't have to swap the drive back first if it's that difficult but if you can't reinstall anything from CD or FW I'm not sure where else to start.
Will the CD drive successfully just read a CD? The "early" hang is what's puzzling - like it not passing a memory check or something…
Maybe you ought to swap the RAM back again too.
I know - it's tedious, it's aggravating but it's pretty much all you can do. It's a process of elimination.

There is a guy around here that fixes Macs…I forget his name…maybe he has an idea?

[LillyOmegaWolf]

i installed OS 10.2 off a CD i burned on my hackintosh... so I would say the ibooks DVD drive works okay.

Sounds like SSD removal time then..

[LillyOmegaWolf]

Okay...
Update.
I was reading through 'Any one want to help build a community made OS 9.3?' and I wondered if modifying OS9 could get around things without me pulling it apart.

I went into 10.2.8 and was just going through the about this mac extra info pages when I saw the firewire entry.
There was nothing detected "no devices loaded" or something like that. Duh its dead for some reason.
So i went into the OS9 system folder and while trying to find anything relating to IO that I could temporarily remove to test the SSD I found the firewire extensions. I removed them.
Without touching anything else I restarted and OS9 loaded just like that. Nice and speedy on the OWC SSD

I was interested to see on the toolbar the battery charge specs (cause its not plugged in right now) ibook is getting an extra hour estimated out of battery than it did in 10.2.8 before I had restarted. I guess the lighter OS must be a lot easier on the ibook

Thanks for your help.
I have one final question here.

It's currently on the Mac OS ROM 9.6.1 from the general OS9 drag and drop installer on here. Should I upgrade it to the 10. something rom that the universal one uses? or will there be no real diffrence?
Because I can easily copy my G4's system folder back across to 'update' that.

[GaryN]

Well, you don't have to swap the drive back first if it's that difficult but if you can't reinstall anything from CD or FW I'm not sure where else to start.
Will the CD drive successfully just read a CD? The "early" hang is what's puzzling - like it not passing a memory check or something…

Remember when I said that earlier today? We'll just change that to "like it not passing a Firewire check or something…"

I'm sure that, in its little heart, it really wanted to tell you what was wrong but it was stuck and it just couldn't…

As for the ROM version, I personally doubt there would be any real difference on your G3 with a newer version.*
I don't know if anything in the newer ROM will have a serious effect on that 'puter.

Anybody else know?

Glad to hear it's working!

       *Dammit, as much as I hate to admit it, I am wrong occasionally…

[nanopico]

I'm not sure if you have removed the SSD yet, but here is something you can try first.  If this works then you know both firewire and the SSD are working.
Put the iBook in target disk mode.  Connect it to your OS 9 G4.  If the disk is seen by that machine, then you have some hope.
Here's the thing though.
If 10.2.8 installs, then the SSD is working.
I had a similar issue at one point.  The SSD I had wanted to act as the secondary drive not the primary one.  This would cause all sorts of fun problems.  OS X worked for some reason, but 9 didn't like that.
I also had some issue like this with memory.  If I had memory installed during OS install, it would hang at the same point all the time.  I had 512mb install for a total of 576MB.  Although this works, it was not officially supported.  But going below or at the officially support max ram would allow the install to continue.

As for the ROM.  I have had the best luck with the one that came on the original install disc.  I also found not upgrading to 9.2.2 gave a bit more stability.  But this may just be my system.

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