On May 4, 2010, at 10:27 AM, Manuel Marques wrote:
I also reseted the PRAM,
The Beige has a problem resetting the PRAM. The problem is that the power supply has some capacitors that allow residual charge to keep the old values in the PRAM/NVRAM even after hearing the chimes or typing the "set-defaults" & "reset-all" commands. The ONLY sure way to reset the PRAM/NVRAM in the Beige is to remove the PRAM battery AND the cable from the power supply to the motherboard, and then press the CUDA reset button near the 3rd PCI slot. I also let it rest for 5 minutes or so and press the CUDA AGAIN before reinserting the PRAM battery and power supply cable. This is a pain in the butt, but it's the ONLY way I know to be certain the PRAM/NVRAM is reset on the Beige. This is Beige specific, and there is no reason to go to these extremes on any other Mac model.
and even tried to boot with a OS 8 CD, but nothing, the machine won't boot at all from the CD! It keeps booting from the internal disk.What can I do about it?
Most Beige won't boot from any optical drive that is set to "slave", so the optical drive should be set to "master" and be on a separate bus from the internal HD. The OEM Apple optical drives in the Beige were known to problematic for booting, and using and "modern" CDRW or DVDRW as a replacement is a good idea. Some of the OEM Apple optical drives required a firmware update that can only be done in MacOS. Since OS 8.5 as the most advanced OS when this firmware update was made, if you use it with OS 9.x it will give a warning that can be ignored, and you can still try to run the updater. The updater is "smart" and knows which drives to update, so you should try this updater just in case your optical drive is one the needs this new firmware:
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=24714>
Should I use an external SCSI drive?
In my experience most SCSI optical drives are a flakey and bad as these early ATA optical drives. As I said, a more modern ATA drive set as "master" would be a better solution. You can boot OS X "indirectly" on "slave" set drives using XPostFacto which uses the internal HD as a "helper disk" to start the boot process on and then switches the boot over to the normally unbootable optical HD.
The Beige is probably the most difficult Mac to work on, it's very finicky with lots of quirky, non-Mac like behavior. Honestly, the time for the usefulness of the Beige as past by, and you should consider other options unless you have both time and money to spend on this project, which will most likely be a frustrating handful. PPC Macs to consider as replacements might be AGP G4's, G4 or G5 iMacs, or Minis.
You can run OS X 10.4.11 on a Beige, but you'd need a Radeon graphics card and probably 3x256MB of LOW-DENSITY PC100/133 SDRAM (768MB is the max. for the Beige, low-density means chips of BOTH sides of the module, 16 chips). Even then, any AGP G4 can run circles around the Beige. The Beige is a handful as an upgrade project.
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