Mac Resurrection, partie Quattro

Okay... I spend the last days, since my ladt post to install, and install and reinstall the Power Mac G3. but this time I decided to think a little more of what should be really changed. The previous day were the place for lots of tries to discover and find out the possible part which may stick... The result is pretty simple actually :
- either a RAM problem,
- or a hard disk issue.

I found in a Apple.com discussion forum, that MacOS 10.3 and 10.4 are very sensitive to SCSI cards. Honestly, I had to read a lot of webpages and forum to read this sentence.... So I removed the buit-in SCSI card from the blue&white tower. I'm not using it. It's one less potential issue.

Thursday, I "found" 45 euro to buy a new hard disk. I test the Power Mac with 3 different disks. the original 6 GB harddisk, a semi broken 20 GB disk, and another 6 GB old but clean disk. That all are 6-7 year old. Why did I bought a new disk, when I wanted to buy nothing for this computer (I consider it as a game with no end price.. I mean, if I could repair it, that's cool, if not, I wouldn't loose anything). But, well, I could always use this hard disk in another computer or as external disk for backups.... A hard disk has always a use ;)

I Installed the brand new 80 GB hard disk inside the tower, replacing the Apple Disk. And tried one more time the installation of Tiger.... with no success..... I tried I guess 3 times, even with the Zero writing option. The issue wasn't coming from the hard disk, nor the SCSI card.

In the same Apple.com discussion board, you could read that these OS are very keen on the kind of RAM you're using.... And the last days confirmed this. This was the last and only known potential issue that could be resolved.
When I got the Power Mac, there were 3 RAM slots full out of 4. 1 Apple 64 MB + 1 unknown 64 MB + 1 unknown 128 MB RAM. I got these number from one installation try, and the "about this Mac" dialog. Nothing was written on the RAM.
From older PC boxes, I got other RAM : 2 unkown 256 MB PC133 RAM, and 1 unknown 64MB PC100 RAM.

PC133 RAM are backward compatible with PC100 one. You know this when you get a PC. And this has been confirmed in the Apple.com discussion. However, I experienced the opposite. You should know that the more memory you have the better the computer will run. It's obvious that I wanted to use all the 128 MB and 256 MB RAM in the 4 Power Mac slots. And I always get "writing" errors during the installation. So I tried using only P100 RAM. And guess what ? I got errors in the Essential installtion. So I tried Panther this time and : I got no spam (hmmm..., wrong... this is a quote from Twit ;) ). I got no problem to install Panther ! (this happened today morning). Yeeeepeee !

Happy, I prepare myself a nice omelette with vegetable for lunch !

After that, I began the updates session : updating Panther up to 10.3.9 goes in a charm ! Quicktime, iTunes, Java installed themselves easily... But not the Java update where I got a message from the Installer like 'outdated codec'.

I have finally a stable Power Mac G3 (White & Blue), with 448 MB of RAM, 80 GB IDE harddisk, running Panther (10.3.9).

I installed some little free applications, like
- Transmission for bittorrent download,
- AdiumX for Instant Messenging
- Colloquy for IRC

I'll see in the future what I'll do with this computer. I think I will use it to learn more the BSD system, and particularly Darwin and the specific path of files and directories. (I already learned a lot, when I followed a technical paper from Apple.com, that uses the console to find out issues and repair the OS...).

My main task (repairing the computer) is done. I cost about 2 month in all, and 45 euro (for the harddisk).