My flat beige G3 had a good year with OSX but it came to an end a few days ago. It started with being unable to open the System Prefs, which was no immediate problem but something that was going to have be fixed eventually. Apple Discussions suggested a few things that did not work, ending with the conclusion that I should do an Archive & Install.
I knew that installing OSX on a beige G3 was risky. When I did it to a freshly formatted disk a year ago, the OS10.1 installer had quit several times. And later the Jaguar installer had also quit once. Sure enough, Archive & Update quit in the middle of the install. The OSX and OS9 partitions would not mount. Disk Utility Verify said they needed repair, but running repair showed no repairing being done and ended with an OK, which Verify contradicted again. I found a Startup Disk CP on DiskWarrior's CD, and it could not see any bootable systems. With that, I threw in the towel on the old G3 and took its hard drive over to MacTown where it found a home in a new G4 1.25 DP. After partitioning the new G4 and installing OSX on two of the new partitions, I ran Drive 10 from one of those partitions against the dead partition. Drive 10 worked for two hours, running from disk on a fast G4 DP, after which the dead partition became mountable and all the OSX applications on it still worked. The wreckage of old OSX system was strewn about, with odd Unix folders showing in the window. The OS9 partition also showed up under the new system, without any action on my part. After a day, I am completely back to normal, and would like to emphasize the importance to me of partitioning. Due to partitioning, I did not even need my backups. I kept nothing of value on a system partition that can be lost - I don't use Apple's Documents folder for anything. All my data was on a Data partition, and all my photos and other stuff was on an Other partition, including every installer that I had ever downloaded. Had the OSX partition been totally lost, I would have only lost applications which are easily reinstalled from CDs and from my stored downloaded installers. As it was, I only lost the OS and not a thing else. I dragged everything over to the new disk, as I intend to reformat and reorganize the old disk soon. And that brings up two more points. First, it is amazing the way you can drag an OSX application from one system disk to another. With OS9, if you did that, all kinds of little pieces would be left behind in the OS9 system folder. With OSX, the whole package travels when you drag the icon. Second, every program did react to the move to the new system drive by wanting its serial number. And every serial number I have ever had was in a free form address book called InTouch With, ready for pasting. For things like this, my Entourage cannot replace Intouch With, which I have used many time each day since 1993. It's at <http://www.intouchwith.com/>. Allan Atherton | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be February 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
