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Imac G3 with an SSD won't boot OS X 10.4 Tiger.

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First post, by Paddan1000

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I found an Imac G3 that no one else wanted and took it home to see how far I could upgrade it. It is the strawberry colored kind with a slot-loaded DVD and a 400 MHz processor.

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I installed 512 MB of RAM and replaced the original 10 GB hard drive with a 7200 RPM 120 GB one. I upgraded it to the latest firmware and installed OS 9.2 and OS X 10.4 Tiger which would both boot perfectly.

Then I got my hands on a 16 GB SSD and put it in the Imac instead of the hard drive, after HD Tune had declared it error free. I reformatted it into three partitions with the HFS+ file system and installed OS 9 on one partition. OS 9 would then boot and run without any problems.

But then I installed OS X 10.4 Tiger on another partition (7.5 GB). It got no error messages during the installation, but the computer would no longer boot. It would display the gray apple for a couple of minutes and then stop and perpetually display a grey "Ø"-sign. Once I did something that instead would display a lot of UNIX-related commands that ended with the phrase "Panic: We are hanging here".

I tried to reformat the SSD and reinstall everything from the beginning, carefully doing exactly like I had done when installing it on the hard drive, but the results were identical to the first time.

I put the 120 GB hard drive back and it worked as well as it had done before I replaced it with the SSD. I reformatted it, reinstalled everything and still both OS 9 and OS X would boot.

So my question is: Why would only OS 9 but not OS X Tiger boot from the SSD, when everything worked as it was supposed to on a regular hard drive?

Reply 1 of 3, by zstandig

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I know this is an old thread, but since no one is helping, I thought I should offer what I could.

I have a G3 iMac like you do, it's a little newer, it's max ram is 1GB, like you I wanted to beef it up more, so I got a faster HDD. Then I learned about SSDs, and I got one eventually.
(made by other world computing)

It had to connect using a SATA to PATA converter, I didn't know about that, the way it was advertised as a "legacy" SSD I assumed it would be PATA, but I was too happy to have the SSD to complain. Anyway I tried to install MintPPC and OS9 onto it and neither worked (wouldn't recognize the SSD) so I went back to the 7200 speed HDD.

Personally I believe the reason it doesn't work well could be because the SSD isn't a native PATA drive, that and SSD's are still emerging and even though they aren't advertised as experimental...that's really what they are. Early adopters are always beta testers.

Finally not all SSDs are the same, unfortunatly my pockets aren't deep enough to just buy a whole slew of them and spend a weekend trying to get them to work in my imac.

Reply 2 of 3, by cdoublejj

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do you understand why SSDs use stat? do you know what trim and garbage collection are and why they are important? also are you aware they make IDE SSD with SLC chips to help counter the lack of trim and garbage collection? are you aware IDE to sata and vise versa adapters aren't always 100% working/stable?

EDIT: one might try an a SATA 10k RPM WD RAPTOR with an IDE to sata adapter if they can get an ssd working.

Reply 3 of 3, by zstandig

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MintPPC can probably use trim etc, I had some instructions for optimizing it, but since it never booted I never bothered and now use the SSD in my laptop. At the time I assumed the IDE to SATA adapter would work fine as it came with the SSD and was advertised working with older hardware.

As for the Ops issues, I can't answer for him.

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