Installing OS onto 333Mhz iMacs

Question

Hello, it's been a year or so since I last used this forum. I know this question has probably been asked before, but I am in need of an answer quite quickly and I know this is the right place to come to.
As the part-time Mac tech in our school, I get the task of making the Macs run smoothly. With all the financial crunches in the schools nowadays, we just inherited a dozen 333Mhz iMacs for our school. My problem is that while they all do start up, all must have an OS re-installed on them. They start up with the "?"
I would like to install OS 9.2.2 onto them, as we have the legal install disks at the school. Here's the catch. None of them have functioning CD drives, and none have firewire ports. Is it possible to install the OS via a network connection or from a disk image?
Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

All of the computers boot to the "?" on the folder, probably indicating they can't find an operating system. It would be time consuming to open each one up to replace or repair each individual optical drive. Not to mention the cost versus practicality of doing so with these machines.
You need to make a master machine and clone things from there. The only possible way around opening up the machine is to do a network boot. You would have to figure out the way of setting up the network server. I assume the 333 can do a network boot.
The other thing is that I have limited resources at our elementary school for a full scale tear-down. Our new tech support guy is not great with Macs, but is more of a PC tech. I was hoping that there was a quick fix to my problem other than to open each one up.
The hardware skills are the same. Perhaps you can convince him to deal with the hardware and you the software.
What you need to do is create a master copy of the software then copy it to all the other harddrives.
In case you should try a machine with Mac OS X, you should verify that you have the latest firmware, before installing new software. See the system profiler for details. What firmware do you need?
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86117
You may run Mac OS 10.3 on this machine.
Mac OS X takes about 4gig. With a custom setup, you can reduce this to 3gig.
For X, you will need a minimum of 128meg of ram. More is better. I'd suggest 256. You may put 512meg of ram in this machine. There are two memory slots. One must be Low Profile memory. Be sure you can return your memory cards. iMac memory cards are finicky.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/iMac-G3-G4/
All the tray loading iMac g3's, models a-d, are constructed the same. The 333 is the model d.
Here is a good disassembly page:
http://www.macopz.com/columns/imacrepair/disassembly.html
The second article in this series has information on replacing the battery:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=2584291
How To Upgrade Your iMac
http://www.djonmac.com/
The tray loading iMac requires the boot partition to be within 8gig. Since there are hidden partition before the first visible partition, people recommend that you make the first visible partition 7.5 gig to 7.9gig. The machines support upto a 128gig Parallel ATA drive.
You should be able to use Unix symbolic links to 'move' some directory like /Users to the second visible partition.
Robert