A friend of mine had a slot-loading iMac G3 that suddenly stopped recognizing its hard drive. He was going to turn it into a fish tank but I wouldn't allow it. I bought a 40gb hard drive and installed it, but it won't even read this one. Has anyone heard of this happening? I'm starting up from a Mac OSX cd and when it gets to "Select a Destination" it only lists the install cd. I'm thinking maybe the power cable to the hard drive is faulty but I really have no idea. Any suggestions?
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iMac G3..help!
- Thread starter Gibson424
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I'm not sure I even have a way to install it. I'm pretty sure it was running osx before the hard drive crashed. i'm still testing things out...when in doubt, open it up! (i'll be careful)..thanks for your response
Also, make sure the RAM is seated properly. Though I think the slot loaded had a soldered in chip, so that might not be the issue (or, if it is, is probably a bigger one than the imac is worth). Still, worth a shot, so double check that as well...
May also be a faulty IDE cable, when you open it up, test it out with the one that came with the replacement drive.
May also be a faulty IDE cable, when you open it up, test it out with the one that came with the replacement drive.
No soldered ram on a iMac G3 firewire. Just two slots. Reseat the ram. Try a target mode start off firewire and external hd. Good old workhorse machines. Your idea about the powercable to the hd being bad is interesting. Considering you can pick up one of these machines on any Craigslist for less than 100USD, I wouldn't waste TOO much time on it -- tho, at less than 100 usd and the ability to run Tiger/iLife and itunes on a 120gb hard drive makes these iMac G3s worth their weight in gold.
Have you tried setting up the partitions & initializing the 40GB drive in Disk Utility first, before getting to the "select destination" point? Does the drive appear in Disk Utility at all?
that's exactly why I really want this thing to work. The hard drive I bought didn't come with any cables..I got it on Amazon and tried spending as little as possible.
I did install another ram chip when i installed this new drive...but since the original hard drive disappeared without any change to the ram, I can't imaging that's the issue. I'll try taking out the other chip, though. The bummer is, for a little more than I paid for this hard drive, I could buy another iMac on ebay that would probably work fine.
I did install another ram chip when i installed this new drive...but since the original hard drive disappeared without any change to the ram, I can't imaging that's the issue. I'll try taking out the other chip, though. The bummer is, for a little more than I paid for this hard drive, I could buy another iMac on ebay that would probably work fine.
The OSX disc is really old and I don't even see disc utility anywhere in the menu. I've booted from a Tiger and Panther CD before and used disk utility so I've seen where it should be, and on this disc, I don't see it. Maybe I'll try to round up a Tiger disc.....or even OS9. maybe it just doesn't like X..
Does it have FireWire? You could see and FWTDM (firewire target disk mode) it to another mac and boot the working one up on an OS X disk and choose, if it comes up, the iMac's HD. 