OS X 10.3 Installation was a nightmare at first, but it turned out that all of my problems were due to the SCSI card. I was having problems booting the X install CD, and when I managed to get it to install once, it would never re-boot into X. It eventually would not even boot into 9.2. After I removed the SCSI card, everything went just fine.
The Adaptec SCSI card conversion apparently does not work, or I'm doing something else wrong. The flash utility runs fine, and running it a second time shows the card as having the new 4.1 ROM. The Adaptec/PowerDomain utilities run fine in OS 9.2 (SCSI probe, Control Panel), and the card is apparently working. But whenever I connect a drive to it, the machine will not boot. It never gets past the "Grey Screen" with a mouse pointer in the upper left corner. Sometimes the mouse pointer is frozen, sometimes it's moveable.
The card was working in a PC before I brought it home, so I know it was working before. The drive I connected is a working drive that normally is in an external drive box connected to my S900, and works fine there. I've basically given up on it, and will eventually move the VST UltraTek66 card, drive and CD/RW from the S900 into the B&W. I've got a SCSI CD/RW that I'll stick into the S900.
Also, it appears that the ATI Radeon 7000 PCI cards are getting hard to find. Local CompUSA didn't have them any longer, and NewEgg doesn't seem to have any either. I did a search at NewEgg for Radeon 7000 and turned up a PowerColor Radeon 7000 with 64 meg DDR and all 3 outputs - VGA, DVI and TV Out for $58.00. I ordered one and it's exactly the same as the ATI/Sapphire cards. It flashed sucessfully using the same utilities I used on my ATI 7000 with 32 megs. It's running fine.
So, the Blue & White G3 is a nice machine, and a great upgrade from the S900. They are going pretty cheap on eBay - I got mine for $250, which is exactly what I paid for the S900 3 years ago! It has a 100 mhz bus, 4 PC100 RAM slots for a total of 1 gig RAM, 4 PCI slots (one of which is a 66 mhz slot for the video card), has built in modem, 10/100 ethernet, 2 USB, 2 Firewire, 1 ADB port, and ATA33 IDE port. The rev 2 is important, as the original models had a defective IDE controller chip that only allowed a single drive, and if you replaced the original drive, you had a good chance of getting disk corruption!
Currently the only G4 upgrade card is 500 mhz with 1 meg of 250 mhz cache, which can be had on eBay new for $170. But Sonnet says that 700 mhz and 1 ghz are coming soon. This thing is already faster than my 450 mhz G4 S900, so if the price of the 700's is too high (over $300), then I'll just get the 500. The 1 gig models will be over $400, too much for me!
Meanwhile, I'm enjoying having 2 OS X machines!
Dan
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