Hard drive and OS X installation problems, B&W G3
My brother has a blue and white G3 and he recently decided to replace his 9 GB SCSI hard drive with a 40 GB IDE that I originally owned. He's been working on it at home but he's had many problems over the past few days. He is not a big fan of registration for forums, and he's had problems registering anyway, so I told him to just IM me a sequence of events as to what has happened so far. Basically the scenario is that he can't get his OS X 10.2 installation to work on the new hard drive. He's tried lots of stuff but it's still not working right. Here it is:
- Got the HD, which had some files on it. Wiped it.
- Started installing OS X, but halfway through the installation the screen dimmed and a dialog box came up saying he had to restart. The computer was frozen, he had to use the reset button.
- He started up from the OS X 10.2 CD again and ran disk first aid to try and fix the disk. Disk first aid said it had "horrible errors" (his words) and couldn't be fixed.
- Attempted initialization again. Failed.
- Attempted initialization yet again. Success.
- OS 9 installed, by dragging a full OS 9 system folder over to the just-initialized hard drive.
- Tried to install OS X again. First CD worked, second CD hung up halfway through, forcing a reset. However, the first CD's installation was successful, so it should work.
- Now the computer will boot into OS X but Finder won't launch. So at least OS X is working partially.
- After Finder wouldn't launch, he tried using Norton Disk Fixer version 6, which also said he had tons of errors. This was a bootable OS 9 CD with the software on it.
- Now the computer will boot into OS 9 and it works in OS 9. However, it won't launch finder after booting into OS X.
Any ideas what's going on? Suggestions? Any help you could give would be much appreciated.
- Got the HD, which had some files on it. Wiped it.
- Started installing OS X, but halfway through the installation the screen dimmed and a dialog box came up saying he had to restart. The computer was frozen, he had to use the reset button.
- He started up from the OS X 10.2 CD again and ran disk first aid to try and fix the disk. Disk first aid said it had "horrible errors" (his words) and couldn't be fixed.
- Attempted initialization again. Failed.
- Attempted initialization yet again. Success.
- OS 9 installed, by dragging a full OS 9 system folder over to the just-initialized hard drive.
- Tried to install OS X again. First CD worked, second CD hung up halfway through, forcing a reset. However, the first CD's installation was successful, so it should work.
- Now the computer will boot into OS X but Finder won't launch. So at least OS X is working partially.
- After Finder wouldn't launch, he tried using Norton Disk Fixer version 6, which also said he had tons of errors. This was a bootable OS 9 CD with the software on it.
- Now the computer will boot into OS 9 and it works in OS 9. However, it won't launch finder after booting into OS X.
Any ideas what's going on? Suggestions? Any help you could give would be much appreciated.
Comments
My suggestion is to remove the old drive, install the new one alone, and install the operating system. Make sure it is up and running before you decide to copy programs.
Then I am afraid you will have to swap hard drives, burn everything onto CD's and then reinstall the new hard drive and copy them across.
If you try to copy across directly with both HD's in the system, the computer will appear frozen while it argues with itself. Programs will transfer corruptly, and if you have two system folders (One on the new, and one on the old) then it will problems.
I hope this helps you prevent any loss of files. I lost a lot of irreplacable photos before I learned of this built in 'feature'. You would think with all the information they get when you register hardware they would actually contact you to say "By the way, your system isn't going to do this"
Good luck.