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?