Beating 8G limit on Beige G3
There's a throw-away comment at http://www.lowendmac.com/best/beige-g3.html which says:
Does anyone have any experience of this? Will OS X boot from a 40G partition on a Beige G3 if the drive is plugged into a Tempo or Ahard?
Are there any other solutions?
Quote:
Not only is the beige G3 a competent machine in its own right, but it is very expandable, thanks to the three PCI expansion slots. Some PCI IDE controllers, such as the Acard Ahard and Sonnet Tempo, not only support faster protocols (ATA66 and ATA133) but also allow booting OS X from large drives without the need to partition them.
Not only is the beige G3 a competent machine in its own right, but it is very expandable, thanks to the three PCI expansion slots. Some PCI IDE controllers, such as the Acard Ahard and Sonnet Tempo, not only support faster protocols (ATA66 and ATA133) but also allow booting OS X from large drives without the need to partition them.
Does anyone have any experience of this? Will OS X boot from a 40G partition on a Beige G3 if the drive is plugged into a Tempo or Ahard?
Are there any other solutions?
Comments
Originally posted by peharri
There's a throw-away comment at http://www.lowendmac.com/best/beige-g3.html which says:
Does anyone have any experience of this? Will OS X boot from a 40G partition on a Beige G3 if the drive is plugged into a Tempo or Ahard?
Are there any other solutions?
Before I upgraded I was running 10.2 on a Beige G3 with a 120GB Maxtor attached to an Acard 6260 ATA 66 Card. No problems at all.
I have never tried this but I have heard of one person who installed OSX on a large HD on another Powermac then popped it into his beige and got passed the 8 GB limit. However, this may just be internet legend.
Good luck
Originally posted by OCMG
I have never tried this but I have heard of one person who installed OSX on a large HD on another Powermac then popped it into his beige and got passed the 8 GB limit. However, this may just be internet legend.
Good luck
He was lucky. The software ROM was located somewhere on the first 8 GB, so it can't really tell the difference. If you somehow move the ROM off the first 8 GB, then it breaks again.
Originally posted by OCMG
Before I upgraded I was running 10.2 on a Beige G3 with a 120GB Maxtor attached to an Acard 6260 ATA 66 Card. No problems at all.
I have never tried this but I have heard of one person who installed OSX on a large HD on another Powermac then popped it into his beige and got passed the 8 GB limit. However, this may just be internet legend.
Good luck
Thanks!
I shall probably double check with Sonnet or Acard but it does seem an avenue worth exploring now.
I suspect that the latter probably works initially but it's not safe - I believe the reason for the 8gig limit is that the version of OpenFirmware in the Beige G3s can only access the first 8gigs, and OS X's bootstrap (which is responsible for loading the kernel, not to mention in need of loading itself) can only access the disk via OpenFirmware. As a result, if any of the files that needs to be loaded before the kernel runs were to wander off that first 8 gigs of the disk...
And it's not unlikely either. Updating 10.2 to 10.2.8 would probably do it if there was a lot of crap on the disk.
Originally posted by peharri
There's a throw-away comment at http://www.lowendmac.com/best/beige-g3.html which says:
Does anyone have any experience of this? Will OS X boot from a 40G partition on a Beige G3 if the drive is plugged into a Tempo or Ahard?
Are there any other solutions?
Well, if you hangout in the XPF forum, there have been few reports that IDE drives on the beige G3 are read as SCSI drives and allows Panther to install on 9GB+ drives.
Unfortunately, most SCSI drives has the reverse problem being seen as IDE/ATA drives and has to be partitioned to less then 9GB for Panther installation.
It's just a good bug for Beige G3 user and bad bug for the legacy PM72-9600 users on the Panther installer.