Display problems when installing Panther

Question

I purchased a G3 blue/white from work with 9.2.2 and the panther install disks (3 of them). The monitor was fine in 9.2.2. Upon inserting the panther disks, the display went grayscale and was next to unreadable. However, the install continued through disks one and two (never asked for 3?). Rebooting does not help, but I can tell it is running os x. Did the display drivers crash? I do not have the original 9.2.2 disks. Any advice?
I can tell you it has 192 ram and is a 300 mhz. I can't recall the size of the hard drive. However, when I opened the drive icon after installing panther, it listed about 40 mg as available.

Answer 1

For your machine to be upgraded from 9.2.2 to OS X, the firmware needs to be upgraded first. If you have not upgraded the firmware, I suggest that you go to Apple's firmware site and follow the instructions there to download and install the firmware.
I recently went through the process of updating the firmware on a iMac G3 and found the process to be a little tricky. This is what I learned:
After downloading the software, there was a folder called iMac Firmware Update on my desktop. That had 3 files in it, including an "About iMac Firmware Update". It is crucial to read that and to follow the directions. Rougly, you have to:
- double click the iMac Firmware Updater
- shut down the computer when prompted
-hold in the programmer's button (location shown in the instructions) with the tip of a pen and restart while holding the button
- keep holding the button until a long tone is heard
- after that, the update runs by itself and the computer will reboot. After it rebooted, I received a message that the update had been completed successfully.
The details might vary slightly for your machine, but I expect the general method is the same.
I hope this helps.
Message was edited by: Rich JG