As a longtime owner of a similarly kitted-out PM G3 with a 1.1ghz Powerlogix CPU, this series has been absolute gold. Great work so far Tom. I can tell you that having that much power in a G3 tower was even sweeter back in the day circa 2004/2005. I recall that at the time performance with video playback and World of Warcraft was through the roof compared to the stock 400mhz G3.
We used to have one of these that ran OS9. I remember the massive CRT display we had for it. I found the install disks and hard drive caddy digging through some boxes last week. We donated our's sadly, still wish we'd kept it.
Nice one Tom. You might be able to re-thread the screw holes in the G3 as those cases are made of fairly soft metal, I've had success doing so with other machines.
Tom, I have seen that power on issue before, check your power supply and I will bet you money you have some capacitors leaking in that power supply, you might want to order a spare. Keep the videos coming, I am enjoying this series.
So after watching through the video, once again it's funny how it's supposed to work but doesn't haha. Something else to look into is using the system preferences with the boot option on the SSD RAID while booted from the IDE install. Just something to try, but knowing you, you've probably figured it out now lol. Happy Holidays to you and the family Tom!
Hello Tom. What you made in Tiger installation screen is Software RAID - it only exists after OS is loaded (or at least portion of it, like that from Install CD) along with RAID driver. But during the boot sequence there's nothing of a kind, so SATA adapter handles SSDs as non-RAID and tries to boot from one of them, presumably one with lowest ID stated. Thus, G3 locks down. Make Hardware RAID using adapter BIOS capabilities. Still not sure if it is possible to do on a Mac. p.s. Prove me right or wrong by installing OS Tiger to only one of those SSDs. Looking forward to part 4!
Great video! You don't have any hardware issues. Mac OS X does not support booting from a software RAID. Not possible. It's a shame the OSX installer doesn't see that and throw an error. Sorry you went through all the trouble. I did the same years ago. If I can find the Apple document I will pass it along. You will have to use a single SSD for your boot volume. Cheers!
web.archive.org/web/20080321122125/docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=ServerAdmin/10.5/en/c5sa15.html Midway down - "No PPC-based Macs support booting from software RAID volumes."
Hello, Tom! I had the same boot problem with my test eMac machine (made RAID0 with SSD (sata to pata adapter) and IDE HDD - stupid, I know, but it works like a charm.... ;) however, during the disk utility part of install procedure, you had to partition it (not JUST ERASE!!) and select a partition type labeled "Apple partition map", since old Gx macs simply wont boot if its GUID or other type. And yes, it partitions a RAID just as any normal drive (once the raid is created). I agree with you about cloning, but you could save whole lot of a time if you just cloned instalation dvd to a firewire hdd and booted from that disk. Nevertheless, I enjoyed your videos very much, great job! Thanks for posting! Cheers!!
You can flash a lot of SATA cards with the same Silicon Image chip to boot in a Mac, Tom. I paid just 5 euro for a cheap Chinese card myself, flashed it in a PC, and now it boots inside a PowerMac G4 MDD. No need to spend a lot of money on a Sonnet card when you can do that.
Depending on the version of the 10.4 installer it may try to format GPT (Intel) instead of APM (PPC). I had that problem when I was putting SSDs on a 10.5 machine, and then I forgot to bless that partition, but after about 5 tries I got it up.
1GB is a TON of RAM for back then....I remember having a PC in 2002/2003 with 64MB of RAM that I upgraded to 128MB...worked fine with what I was doing (web browsing, chat rooms, email)
DvdXploitr indeed at that time I had a pentium 4 with 256 mb of ram wich was great and now I have 8 gb of ram and it isnt even considered much at all xD
My 1 Ghz AMD Thunderbird Athlon PC system had 640 MB of RAM in January 2001.I was running Windows 2000 Professional.It was quite the beast back then.A few years later I put a ATI All in Wonder 9700 Pro graphics card in it ias a graphics card upgrade n 2003 .
I used 16MB and 64MB from 1997/8 to 2002, 256MB and 512MB from 2002 to 2008, 1GB in 2009, 2GB from 2009 to 2013, 8GB from 2013 to 2018, 16GB from 2018 to 2021 and 32GB from 2021 onwards!
Maxtor! Uhg! I had the worst luck with those out of all the popular makes. I realize you got to take what you can find, though. I keep of couple of WD IDE drives on hand just in case. I am considering a G4 MDD project myself only to have the fastest possible Mac OS 9/OS X system. Surprised you did not have a dedicated OS 9 system with this G3.
Loving your channel with all the different content and the Hifi setup I love retro gear etc. When you get chance in the future could you do I video about your music keyboards and sound system that would be really cool. Happy New Year wishing you an your family all the best for 2017 :-)
I thought the issue with SSD's is that they only work in G4 computers. I had one fitted one to my G3 clamshell with disastrous results. In retrospect I wonder if the issue was to "Format" the card rather than just erase it. ?
Yes 1gb of ram was quite the crazy amount back then. In 94 it cost $400 for only 16mb, $100 per 4mb stick. For a few years the highest mb per stick was only 64mb, so realistically you might only see a max of 256mb in a machine like that then. 64mb sticks were outrageously expensive.
I just got a boxed TAM (20th Anniversary Macintosh) and it came with a Sonnet G3 processor upgrade. Sonnet seems to be the bigger name out there for these old Powermacs
ItsMyNaturalColour Great series Tom! It'll be interesting what the specs will be at the end of all the upgrades you have planned. Absolutely stunning indeed, the TAM for it's time 1997 was way a head of what anybody else was doing.
ItsMyNaturalColour haha yes! It use to be delivered in a limo and set up for you. Mine came with the registration card and my plans to mail to Cupertino and see if any heads pick up on just what that card is for. If you want you can check out on my instrgam when you got a spare min, iTanner. There's a few other items there I know your PowerPC heart will love
I think that way it is done is to have OS X Tiger on a mechanical drive and have your settings and data on the RAID drives as you will always have your OS X Tiger install DVD but it is your settings and data that are your precious things.
If you haven't already, you should remove that Maxell PRAM battery. They are notorious for leaking their battery acid everywhere and destroying the logic board. They have totaled a countless number of 68k Macs that were in storage.
I used to use maxtor drives in my pc builds years ago they were always reliable for me .Apparently according to Wikipedia some early mac g3 blue and whites had problems with the internal ide no idea what could be causing it to not boot from your sata raid but might be worth asking in this Facebook group facebook.com/groups/lowendmac/ .
As a longtime owner of a similarly kitted-out PM G3 with a 1.1ghz Powerlogix CPU, this series has been absolute gold. Great work so far Tom.
I can tell you that having that much power in a G3 tower was even sweeter back in the day circa 2004/2005. I recall that at the time performance with video playback and World of Warcraft was through the roof compared to the stock 400mhz G3.
This is why when upgrading a computer you do it one device at a time.
Thanks for this very interesting video as usual.
We used to have one of these that ran OS9. I remember the massive CRT display we had for it. I found the install disks and hard drive caddy digging through some boxes last week. We donated our's sadly, still wish we'd kept it.
Nice one Tom. You might be able to re-thread the screw holes in the G3 as those cases are made of fairly soft metal, I've had success doing so with other machines.
When he said "SSDs" I went like "whaaaat" :D
My afternoon just got better! :D
Tom, I have seen that power on issue before, check your power supply and I will bet you money you have some capacitors leaking in that power supply, you might want to order a spare. Keep the videos coming, I am enjoying this series.
Yay, part 3! Will comment on thoughts and stuff when I finish like before Tom!
So after watching through the video, once again it's funny how it's supposed to work but doesn't haha. Something else to look into is using the system preferences with the boot option on the SSD RAID while booted from the IDE install. Just something to try, but knowing you, you've probably figured it out now lol. Happy Holidays to you and the family Tom!
i was laughing my head off when you was talking about the USB Card reminds me of that G5 video that you did with James
Hello Tom.
What you made in Tiger installation screen is Software RAID - it only exists after OS is loaded (or at least portion of it, like that from Install CD) along with RAID driver. But during the boot sequence there's nothing of a kind, so SATA adapter handles SSDs as non-RAID and tries to boot from one of them, presumably one with lowest ID stated. Thus, G3 locks down.
Make Hardware RAID using adapter BIOS capabilities. Still not sure if it is possible to do on a Mac.
p.s. Prove me right or wrong by installing OS Tiger to only one of those SSDs. Looking forward to part 4!
I really like this upload schedule for this video series, keep it up IMNC.
Love your channel Tom. Keep up the good work!
Great video! I learned a ton and am now planning on tricking out my B&W. :D
Great video! You don't have any hardware issues. Mac OS X does not support booting from a software RAID. Not possible. It's a shame the OSX installer doesn't see that and throw an error. Sorry you went through all the trouble. I did the same years ago. If I can find the Apple document I will pass it along. You will have to use a single SSD for your boot volume. Cheers!
web.archive.org/web/20080321122125/docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=ServerAdmin/10.5/en/c5sa15.html
Midway down - "No PPC-based Macs support booting from software RAID volumes."
Please get it working Tom, I don't want the series to end 😥
Hey Scott, the series will have to end at some point but not before I get it working, you've got nothing to worry about :)
Hello, Tom! I had the same boot problem with my test eMac machine (made RAID0 with SSD (sata to pata adapter) and IDE HDD - stupid, I know, but it works like a charm.... ;) however, during the disk utility part of install procedure, you had to partition it (not JUST ERASE!!) and select a partition type labeled "Apple partition map", since old Gx macs simply wont boot if its GUID or other type. And yes, it partitions a RAID just as any normal drive (once the raid is created). I agree with you about cloning, but you could save whole lot of a time if you just cloned instalation dvd to a firewire hdd and booted from that disk. Nevertheless, I enjoyed your videos very much, great job! Thanks for posting! Cheers!!
Great video Tom, waiting to see part4!
You can flash a lot of SATA cards with the same Silicon Image chip to boot in a Mac, Tom. I paid just 5 euro for a cheap Chinese card myself, flashed it in a PC, and now it boots inside a PowerMac G4 MDD. No need to spend a lot of money on a Sonnet card when you can do that.
That's awesome dude!
ItsMyNaturalColour time for the next pet when you have time
Depending on the version of the 10.4 installer it may try to format GPT (Intel) instead of APM (PPC).
I had that problem when I was putting SSDs on a 10.5 machine, and then I forgot to bless that partition, but after about 5 tries I got it up.
Tried booting into verbose mode? It'll tell you exactly where you're error lays.
come on, Tom... gotta get part 4 up before the new year!
Try booting with verbose mode to see where it hangs!
1GB is a TON of RAM for back then....I remember having a PC in 2002/2003 with 64MB of RAM that I upgraded to 128MB...worked fine with what I was doing (web browsing, chat rooms, email)
DvdXploitr indeed at that time I had a pentium 4 with 256 mb of ram wich was great and now I have 8 gb of ram and it isnt even considered much at all xD
My old ibm t21 laptop has just 256mb max it supports is 512mb i think
My 1 Ghz AMD Thunderbird Athlon PC system had 640 MB of RAM in January 2001.I was running Windows 2000 Professional.It was quite the beast back then.A few years later I put a ATI All in Wonder 9700 Pro graphics card in it ias a graphics card upgrade n 2003 .
I used 16MB and 64MB from 1997/8 to 2002, 256MB and 512MB from 2002 to 2008, 1GB in 2009, 2GB from 2009 to 2013, 8GB from 2013 to 2018, 16GB from 2018 to 2021 and 32GB from 2021 onwards!
this is a monster gpu, i watch this on my rx 480 xD
Jarno i have a GeForce 750 Ti xD
MassLanFFS Vasa i have a 1050 Ti!
Jarno gtx 960 over here
RTX 2060 now
nice man.
why did you comment this after 4 years?
just curios
Maxtor! Uhg! I had the worst luck with those out of all the popular makes. I realize you got to take what you can find, though. I keep of couple of WD IDE drives on hand just in case. I am considering a G4 MDD project myself only to have the fastest possible Mac OS 9/OS X system. Surprised you did not have a dedicated OS 9 system with this G3.
Wow . Thx and hi from Venezuela. you made my day
I have a card with 4 usb, 2 sata, and an IDE channel sitting in my 98 computer.
That thing is handy!
This time you knew what causes these machines to not start at all and even what helps in that case ;)
loving this series Tom!
Loving your channel with all the different content and the Hifi setup I love retro gear etc. When you get chance in the future could you do I video about your music keyboards and sound system that would be really cool.
Happy New Year wishing you an your family all the best for 2017 :-)
I thought the issue with SSD's is that they only work in G4 computers. I had one fitted one to my G3 clamshell with disastrous results. In retrospect I wonder if the issue was to "Format" the card rather than just erase it. ?
I hope you put Mac OS 9 on there, that would be very cool. To see how fast it flys
Yes 1gb of ram was quite the crazy amount back then. In 94 it cost $400 for only 16mb, $100 per 4mb stick. For a few years the highest mb per stick was only 64mb, so realistically you might only see a max of 256mb in a machine like that then. 64mb sticks were outrageously expensive.
hey is it faster on the internet then the Wii
You could have booted in to the tiger disc and selected the IDE-drive in startup disc.
" The system isn't booting yet, where's that hair clip?" 😂
Why don't you boot verbose to see why the spinning wheel doesn't come up?
Awesome video as always and Merry Christmas!
where did you go! Will there be a part 4? :(
Once you've got Mac OS X running on it try to install something like Debian on it.
I just got a boxed TAM (20th Anniversary Macintosh) and it came with a Sonnet G3 processor upgrade. Sonnet seems to be the bigger name out there for these old Powermacs
That's absolutely awesome! :D
Yeah there were a few Sonnet upgrades around for this machine too, and a shed ton for G4s.
ItsMyNaturalColour Great series Tom! It'll be interesting what the specs will be at the end of all the upgrades you have planned. Absolutely stunning indeed, the TAM for it's time 1997 was way a head of what anybody else was doing.
Thank you!
It was indeed, and the initial delivery method was probably the most elaborate home computer delivery in history!
ItsMyNaturalColour haha yes! It use to be delivered in a limo and set up for you. Mine came with the registration card and my plans to mail to Cupertino and see if any heads pick up on just what that card is for. If you want you can check out on my instrgam when you got a spare min, iTanner. There's a few other items there I know your PowerPC heart will love
i love that HDD with that rubber
had one to when i was younger bit sadly it died
I think that way it is done is to have OS X Tiger on a mechanical drive and have your settings and data on the RAID drives as you will always have your OS X Tiger install DVD but it is your settings and data that are your precious things.
i wish that the original clairis work word typing program was still around.
Are you going to release a Christmas Day vlog I enjoyed your Christmas eve one
Oh, man! Startup Volume can be changed, PRAM(if it was called like that) can be erased. holding ALT ke down during boot should help too.
ITS HERE
damn i have the same exact card as that in my junk, i found it in old pcs in the junk at our field area. :o
going to watch this video on my powermac g3 400mhz B&W. like
Does that PSU in the Power Mac seriously requires two power cables?
I've been waiting for this!
Hi, don't order any sata cables as i think i have some short blue ones which i could send you
In the future you can use verbose mode (Hold V at Startup) to check to see what the OS is getting held up on :)
cool video tom
Have you tried to boot the G3 in verbose mode by pressing CMD + V?
If you haven't already, you should remove that Maxell PRAM battery. They are notorious for leaking their battery acid everywhere and destroying the logic board. They have totaled a countless number of 68k Macs that were in storage.
when are you going to upload part 4?
This just proves that the quicksilver and G3 could've easily fitted 5 hdd's
also, maybe try and find a raid card for macs? xD
Hello Tom, 25:15 Will that set up software RAID or hardware RAID?
Software RAID
Tom, why does your little AirPort Express look unhappy?
It was AirPort update day! All 3 are now updated and rocking their green lights again :)
Do you watch any geeky shows for example the big bang theory? I asked you that like 2 years ago but u didn't respond :D
he missing the beach ball of death 39:12?
Dont know if anyone is reading this but i found an powermac g3 without mainbaord cpu ram and ethernet can anyone say me where i can find that stuff
create a mirrored RAID (RAID1)
i run 3 500GB Samsung EVO in RIAD 0 and 2 1TB in RAID 0 no shits given
i have a server with 6-3TB in RAID 6 and 4-2TB RAID 5 for storage
I used to use maxtor drives in my pc builds years ago they were always reliable for me .Apparently according to Wikipedia some early mac g3 blue and whites had problems with the internal ide no idea what could be causing it to not boot from your sata raid but might be worth asking in this Facebook group facebook.com/groups/lowendmac/ .
xool
are you albino
no hate