Hello! I have a 233 MHz PowerBook G3 PDQ, and I’m having a bit of trouble getting it to boot. I recently installed OS X Puma and erased OS 9.2 but was successfully using OS X. One evening last week, it refused to reboot. When it powered back on, I got a blinking question mark and the 2GB Toshiba HDD seemed to be trying to spin up and immediately powering down repeatedly. I assumed the drive was dead, so I got a 32GB mSATA SSD and an mSATA to 44-pin IDE adapter. When I got the new SSD, I discovered that it froze when attempting to install Puma from my CD. It seemed to hang (including the mouse cursor) on copying files for the Base System. Similar results on Jaguar. I was able to reinstall OS 9 from CD perfectly normally, but with the extra space, I’d like to be able to dual-boot with OS X. In fact, it seems that any large amount of disk I/O in any OS or installer causes a hang (or even kernel panic in the OS X installer). I’ve tried various methods of copying installer files (including cloning disk images) to a separate partition on the SSD and installing that way, but I’m not able to get the installer to start. I’ve made sure that any installer files I’ve used, as well as the target installation partition, are within the first 8GB of the SSD. I’ve also made sure the SSD was using the Apple Partition Map. As a last resort, I connected the old, possibly damaged, hard drive to my MacBook Pro with an IDE to USB adapter and found that it spun up just fine. I made a disk image of the HDD and attempted to restore it to a partition on the mSATA SSD, but this failed under Big Sur’s Disk Utility, and Carbon Copy Cloner’s restoration of this image was not bootable. Finally, since the drive had spun up when connected to USB on my Pro, I attempted to use it again in the PowerBook. Unfortunately, the disk exhibited the same power cycling behavior as before.
PDQ boot/drive issues
- Thread starter jjhof
- Start date
I had exactly the same problem, with exactly the same symptoms. I gave up and went back to a spinner hard drive for my G3 laptop. I discussed it with others and I believe it is related the old ATA-2 standard on those G3s. It's incompatible with the ATA standards of the newer devices. They work perfectly in a G4 Titanium, even a G3 iBook, but not reliably in the old G3 PowerBooks.
If someone does find an SSD solution that works with these old G3s, I'd love to hear about it!
If someone does find an SSD solution that works with these old G3s, I'd love to hear about it!
I have had issues with my RAM and processor card connections, seemingly related to the heat shield not having enough clearance from the top RAM slot. But in those cases, the machine doesn’t boot at all. Any ideas for the issue with the hard disk power cycling, since it works connected to my MBP? If not, where should I look for an IDE drive that won’t die immediately?
It is a finicky machine to install a SSD on but it should work. The method I used worked for me and someone else who tried it after I reported on it. My PDQ is a 233mhz machine with 160mb of ram. Here are the details:
1. I used a Dogfish 64gb mSata with a mSata to IDE enclosure from Amazon.
2. I installed the drive in an external firewire enclosure and formatted it from my PowerBook G3 Pismo using the OS 9 lives install CD.
3. I created 3 partitions. The first one was 2 GB and contains OS 9. The second partition is 4GB and contains OS X 10.2. The third partition is 2 GB in case I want to install something else bootable in the future and the 4th partition is 20-30GB for storage. The rest of the drive was left unallocated.
4. OS 9 was installed by dragging and dropping the System Folder and Applications folder from my Pismo.
5. OS 10.2 was installed using the 10.2 install CD from Macintosh Garden. I did this on the Pismo.
Both OS 9 and 10.2 work on the PDQ. Sometimes the computer freezes when I go to Start Disk to change the boot volume and I have to force restart. 10.2 takes awhile to boot up. I recently installed ONYX and Shadow Killer which has made 10.2 run much better.
I have a copy of OS 9 on a CF card that I can boot from on the PDQ using a CF Card to PC card adapter. I also use this to move files to the PDQ. The other way I move files is through a crossover cable and networking.
1. I used a Dogfish 64gb mSata with a mSata to IDE enclosure from Amazon.
2. I installed the drive in an external firewire enclosure and formatted it from my PowerBook G3 Pismo using the OS 9 lives install CD.
3. I created 3 partitions. The first one was 2 GB and contains OS 9. The second partition is 4GB and contains OS X 10.2. The third partition is 2 GB in case I want to install something else bootable in the future and the 4th partition is 20-30GB for storage. The rest of the drive was left unallocated.
4. OS 9 was installed by dragging and dropping the System Folder and Applications folder from my Pismo.
5. OS 10.2 was installed using the 10.2 install CD from Macintosh Garden. I did this on the Pismo.
Both OS 9 and 10.2 work on the PDQ. Sometimes the computer freezes when I go to Start Disk to change the boot volume and I have to force restart. 10.2 takes awhile to boot up. I recently installed ONYX and Shadow Killer which has made 10.2 run much better.
I have a copy of OS 9 on a CF card that I can boot from on the PDQ using a CF Card to PC card adapter. I also use this to move files to the PDQ. The other way I move files is through a crossover cable and networking.
