PowerBook G3 PDQ Loses Startup Disk on Cold Boot

I have a PowerBook G3 PDQ (266Mhz, 192MB RAM).
For the longest time it's had Mac OS X 10.1 on it, along with Mac OS 9.2.2.
I always noticed that it started up with Mac OS 9 after a cold boot, even if the startup disk was set for the OS X system folder.
So, I reformatted the disk and re-installed OS X 10.1 (being the only version of OS X i own that will run on the machine). Everything ran fine.
But after a cold boot, it lost the startup disk, and i get the flashing question mark on a floppy disk. I can hear the hard disk spin up, then down, then up, then down. Eventually the machine shuts off. I have to boot off a Mac OS 9 CD and select the OS X system folder to make it boot again.
Anyone know how to fix this?
Thanks.

Like S.U. I replaced the PRAM battery on two Wallstreets (got batteries from OWC) and, although I'm very nervous about working with tiny parts, I found it to go well by following the iFixit instruction to the letter. The innards weren't nearly as fragile as I expected and I allowed plenty of time so I wouldn't feel compelled to rush.
The most serious issue I encountered was that the original battery's cable on one WS managed to get snagged under the metal battery bracket when the computer was originally assembled. This compounded the problem that the user--a cigarette smoker--had inadvertently melted the plastic between the trackpad and the front edge of the upper case. This made the case weak at that point and I had to be very careful in dislodging the stuck cable.
I had mentally made the job much more difficult than it turned out to be. Just have the right tools:
1) You may find that, to remove the heat shied screw--requires a Philips #0 screwdriver--you may need to shorten the point of the driver to better fit the shallow cuts in the screw head. The screw is soft and can easily strip out if you indiscreetly use an unmodified #0 Philips.
2) Have an old ice cube tray or egg carton handy to keep the screws sorted.

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Startup disk full error - boots normally but won't start finder

I'm having a problem in which my iMac when it boots gives me an error that the startup disk is full, but other than that it can boot normally and allow me to log in, but after that the startup stalls. I never get past the default "outer space" desktop image and finder never starts, so there's no icons, no dock, and nothing on the menu bar. What's weird is that Safari and Mail start and I can see them because I believe I have them starting automatically at boot. Safari works (I'm using it now to enter this discussion). Mail on the other hand starts but is hung checking for the servers for incoming mail.
I've tried to boot in safe mode (holding down Shift key at startup), but it doesn't work.
I've tried to boot in single user mode (holding down cmd-S at startup), but it doesn't work either.
I've tried to boot from Snow Leopard installation media (holding down C at startup), but it doesn't work as well.
Each time I try one of these alternate boot methods, it just takes me to the normal login screen with the startup disk full message. I click OK, login, and get stuck.
I'm just trying to get the finder started so that I can delete some files, but I just can't get that far. It's strange that the browser works perfectly and internet connection is fine, but nothing else works.
Thoughts? Thanks. - Mike

Hi Lina, and welcome to Apple Discussions.
Safe Mode might allow you to boot and free up some space.
If you have access to another Mac and a FireWire cable, another option would be to use FireWire Target Disk Mode to transfer data to the other Mac and delete it on your MBA.
If either way works, you want to open up somewhere around 15% free space. Once you do that, run Repair Disk: Boot from install disc (insert disc>restart>immediately hold down c key and keep holding it until you see “Preparing Installation”)>at first screen select the language and click Continue> click on the Utilities Menu in the menu bar>open Disk Utility>select your HD in the panel on the left side>click Repair Disk at bottom of main window. Run this at least twice, and keep running it until it says “appears ok” twice in a row. If that doesn’t happen, you may need a stronger utility such as DiskWarrior or if the directory is damaged beyond repair, you may need to reinstall the OS, or you may have a damaged HD (repair utilities can only repair the directory structure, not the HD itself).
Ultimately, though, it sounds like you need a larger HD . . . .

Classic folder not found BUT it os9 appears in startup disk list and boots!

I installed my friends system from scratch it is an old imac G3 with latest firmware updates..
In the end the only way to get it installed the way they wanted was to install tiger and drag the system folder over from the old install
Now what happens when booted to OSX 10.4 "Classic" in the system preferences looks for a classic folder but cant find one.... yet if I go toe system preferences startup There are both the OS X starup and OS 9 Startup disk listed there and if selected OS 9.22 boots and runs fine.
It is listed under startup as Mac OS Z1 - 9.22 Machintosh HD
I have not run software update on Tiger yet so it is probably 10.4.3 or 4 maybe this would help ?
Any ideas why it wont see this as haveing Classic on the system ? It seems strange that Apple wont allow you to point to the correct folder when it exists and boots from it fine.
Interesting enough when I plugged in my external firewire drive (which is where i copied the OS 9.22 system folder across from) and run the system preferences and classic setup it looks and sees the external drive folder as ok to run for classic !
Naturally I have unmounted this as it is my drive and not my friends
thanks for your help

when I open
Classic Preferences, the system looks for eligible
System Folders and lists the ones it has found. On my
Tibook, there is normally only one, and that one is
selected by default. In order to deselect it, I would
have to connect my external drive, which contains (on
separate partitions) three other System Folders
suitable for use as Classic. I would then expect to
be able to choose manually from among the four
eligible candidates, even if one of them were
initially selected by default.
Are you saying that the Classic pane of Sys Prefs on
your computer fails to list any System Folder at all,
even though the one that boots your computer into OS
9.2.2 is present and ready for duty? If so, that is
strange indeed.
mine works exactly the same as your then.
and yes you are also right that it fails to list any system folder as all

External backup drive doesn't show in System Preferences/Startup Disk

Using SuperDuper!, I thought I created a bootable backup on my LaCie FW 200GB ext. HD. I opened System Preferences/Startup Disk to try booting from the LaCie by changing the Startup Disk to the LaCie. The LaCie didn't appear, there. My Mac HD is there, and a Network Startup icon with a question mark in it, is there. I'm on a standalone machine. My Ethernet port is used for a cable modem.
I Restarted and held down the Option key to see if the LaCie would show up that way. No luck. The LaCie is mounted on my desktop, and the System Profiler shows it on the FW bus. So, I don't really have a bootable backup drive (or volume). The LaCie is not partitioned, nor is my internal startup disk.
I did use Disk Utility & found I had to repair the LaCie. Initially, DU said the disk couldn't be repaired, but on a repeat, the LaCie shows as repaired.
How can I get the LaCie to show up in System Preferences/Startup Disk?

Select the external drive's icon and press COMMAND-I to open the Get Info window. In the pane labeled "Ownership and Permissions click on the small triangle gadget beside the word Details. You should see at the bottom a box labeled "Ignore permissions on this volume." If there's a checkmark in the box uncheck it. Close the Get Info window. Now see if the drive appears in the Startup Disk preference.
If you still have a problem then you might try the following:
Extended Hard Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Set the number of partitions from the dropdown menu (use 1 partition unless you wish to make more.) Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled, if supported.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the volume(s) mount on the Desktop.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled, if supported.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process will take 30 minutes to an hour or more depending upon the drive size.
Next clone your system to the external drive:
How to Clone Using Restore Option of Disk Utility
1. Select the destination drive on the Desktop and press COMMAND-I to open the Get Info window. At the bottom in the Ownership and Permissions section be sure the box labeled "Ignore Permissions on this Volume" is unchecked. Set Ownership and Permissions as follows: Owner=system with read/write; Group=admin with read/write; Other with read-only.
2. Open Disk Utility from the Utilities folder.
3. Select the backup or destination volume from the left side list.
4. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (journaled, if available) and click on the Erase button. This step can be skipped if the destination has already been freshly erased.
5. Click on the Restore tab in the DU main window.
6. Select the backup or destination volume from the left side list and drag it to the Destination entry field.
7. Select the startup or source volume from the left side list and drag it to the Source entry field.
8. Double-check you got it right, then click on the Restore button.
For added precaution you can boot into safe mode before doing the clone.

PowerBook G3 (PDQ) - Startup disk and PCMCIA slot problem

Hello
I have encountered a problem with my powerbook G3 (PDQ model)
Once when I had to configure my microphone, I saw that there was "Zoomed video" present in the list of audio inputs.
I thought this was a glitch, and inserted my SD card reader into the lower PCMCIA slot. Then my display got messed up.
The slot insertion doesn't seem to work right too, it resists much more than the top slot does.
It didn't react to anything except Fn-Shift-Ctrl-Power, which is Reset.
It happens in both OS9 and 10.2.
Photo: http://instagr.am/p/NtWNH/
Once I was able to insert it right so it wouldn't mess up, and i used the reader in the lower slot as usual.
When I ejected it, the card didn't pop out as usual and it was hard to pull out, and the screen was messed up as well.
The second problem is that when I start the "Startup Disk" control panel in OS9, the PowerBook hangs for no particular reason, also reacting to Reset only.
Maybe there is a bootloader I can install so I'd choose the OS I want before actually booting anything?
Could these problems be related to each other, or a dead battery? Maybe to the incorrectly set clock (however doesn't seem so)? Or related to using an Apple DVD drive?
Thanks,
~ Vladislav Korotnev

No it hasn't. What kind of battery does it use?
The power battery is dead as well (not charging nor powering the pb)

Powerbook G4 not being recognised as a potentail Startup Disk by my Mac pro

My old Powerbook G4 laptop (3 years old)
Is not being recognized as a potential Startup Disk by my Mac pro,
it is however being recognized as an external hard drive
any help , ideas ???

Hi moon_junior;
Since your PB G4 is based on the PPC chip and the Mac Pro is based in the Intel chip, there is no way for the G4 to recognize the code on the Mac Pro startup disk.
Allan

My Powerbook G4 Is not being recognized as a potential Startup Disk by my M

My old Powerbook G4 laptop (3 years old)
Is not being recognized as a potential Startup Disk by my Mac pro,
it is however being recognized as an external hard drive
any help , ideas ???

Hi
You won't be able to start up your Mac Pro from your Powerbook drive since one uses Intel disk partitioning and the other uses old-style Apple partitioning.
As you've found, you can still read the drive as a storage drive.
Matt

If i reinstall startup disk will i lose my itunes playlist

If i reinstall startup disk to give me more space will i lose my itunes

If you erase the disk then you will lose everything unless you have all your data backed up. However, if you merely do an Archive and Install then your data will not be erased, but this will not save space on the drive. In fact it will end up using about another 10 GBs of space.

I have virtually no space left in my startup disk and it keeps declining in available free space?

Ok fellow Mac people - why would my 500GB start up hard drive suddenly go from 489BG of space free to about 2BG free, and it declines in free space until I reboot the computer. Even after rebooting though it shows I barely have 3GB of space free. It has declined all the way down to 19MB free on my computer at one point!
My time machine backup goes back until Oct 26th and I did not have the problem at that time. The startup disk on that date is at it's normal capacity. Since the 26th of October I have upgraded to OS 10.7 and installed a trial of GoToMeeting - no changes other than that and my normal use. I have emptied the trash and got rid of a bunch of excess files I didn't need anymore as well, but that hasn't helped really.
Any suggestions on what is happening? And, if I go back to the 10/26 startup disk image on the time machine will that affect any other partitions or drives on my computer? I don't want to lose any work that has been done and saved to other drives since then.
Thanks
Liz

I am not familiar at all with that software; however, since your problems appear to have started after you installed it, I would very seriously consider uninstalling it using their uninstaller (if there is one) and/or do a thorough search of the entire hard disk for files containing that name. I'd also consider getting Omnisweeper to check my disk:
http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnidisksweeper/
If you find that you have all your hard drive space back, then there is obviously something going on with that software.

Time Machine and a Cloned StartUp Disk

I have a BootCamp partition on my startup disk that is painfully too small. In the next couple of hours I will have a 2 TB drive delivered to replace it. Splitting it in half between Mountain Lion and BootCamp/Windows, I have addressed any issues I thought would arise. I plan to clone the Mac partition of my current drive onto the new and just do a clean install of the BootCamp/Windows partition. Backups done, preparations taken care of, my final concern has come to mind...
Will Time Machine continue its incremental updating from a cloned drive?
In the past, any time I've changed computers the backup wasn't available. Other forums I've checked says that Time Machine allies itself with the MAC address of the computer it backs up. Some hinted that there's a paring with the drive it backs up as well. Is this true? I'm not changing Macs, I'm not even changing the data; I'm just changing the drive its on.
It's not a big deal if I lose the backup though I'd prefer not having to go through that initialization again. It just seems logical that Time Machine would view the clone same as the original. Any feedback?

I personally only have the Time Machine backup. The main advantage of the Time Machine backup is that it happens automatically every hour that the Mac is active, incrementally backing up files that changed. With a clone, it is only as up to date as the last time you performed a cloning run. The second advantage of Time Machine is that you can +go back in time+ to an earlier state, not just restore to the latest state. With a clone, all you have is the last backup.
The advantage of a clone is that you can boot from it. So if your hard drive fails, you can still use your iMac to wrap up necessary work before sending your iMac in for repair.
It you have two external hard drives, there would be nothing wrong with doing both. Make a clone about once a month and let Time Machine handle the up-to-the-last-hour backups.
If you had to choose one, I would use Time Machine.
It is remotely possible that your primary storage drive and your Time Machine drive will fail at the same time. So I do keep my most critical files (just the files) backed up to second separate storage location. I do that manually.

Startup Disk Full - need to remove photos

Before I begin - please excuse my technological ignorance. If I leave out any information, please let me know and I will get any needed details up asap.
I have a MacBook Pro, running Version 10.9.2 OS X with 8 GB Memory and 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor. After multiple warnings that my startup disk was almost full, I finally received the dreaded 'your startup disk is full' message (my fault for ignoring all of the warnings!). I was able to free up a neglible amount of space by deleting useless files - so now I have 2.54GB free out of 159.18GB.
My iPhoto library is taking up about 82GB of space, with almost 19,000 photos covering the past 10 years. It is time to move a large chunk of them off my IHD but I'm at a loss as to the best way to go about this - and I'm terrified of deleting them from my IHD and then losing them forever.
I have two external hard drives and have copied my iPhoto library to both. Questions are:
*Is it better to backup/copy to EHD the source files for the photos (not sure if I'm using the right wording here) instead of the iPhoto library? While I foresee using Macs for a while, I would hate to lose access to these photos 20 years down the line because I know longer have iPhoto - or (heaven forbid) iPhoto is replaced by something else that can't open my library.
*If yes to above - how do I do this?
*If copying iPhoto library to both EHDs is sufficient and I delete most of my photos from my IHD to free up space (probably all but the most recent 12 months), it seems redudanet to make additional copies of the entire library each time I backup. I don't want 5 iPhoto libraries on my EHD with some duplicate photos in each. The overlap would drive me insane. Is there an incremental backup option that only backs up the new photos to the EHD?
*Is there a better option than EHDs for backing up a huge amount of photos?
Again - please excuse any places I may have used the wrong wording or term - I'm a bit new to this backing up business but want to make sure I don't lose any photos. With a 9 month old baby it seems something precious and photo-worthy happens every couple of minutes.
Thanks!!
Christie

First of all you don't want to backup your photo library if the backup will be your only copy. If you delete the orinal library to gain space that will allow the backup software to delete the photos from your backup.
Also if your photos are valubable to you they really need the protection of a good well tested backup plan. Any data with any values always needs backup protection.
My suggestion is to move your photo library to and EHD that is formatted Mac OS Extended with GUID partition mapping. After the move test your library to be sure that the application can still open it properly. Once that is done, the original library can be deleted.
I would then get another EHD that is formatted MAC OS Extended with GUID partion mapping. Is hould be 2 to three time larger then you disk space start backing up to it. Time Machine is a very simple backup solution. Test the backup by restoring some data from the backup to sure your restore from it.
Allan

Trash shows no content -- and startup disk is allegedly full

Hello all,
By the time you read this my Time Machine backup will have hopefully finished and I will have proceeded to erase my hard drive and reinstall the Mavericks with the internal malice of a waterboarder.
But I'd like to get some feedback from you supers-smarties out there on what could have happened.
I do support on Macs and so like a carpenter when I'm home, my MacBook Pro is always a work in progress. One thing I didn't bother to do was clear out the content of the ~Keychain folder because I was getting that annoying "x service wants to use your login keychain -- enter your password" message. I have root user enabled and I barely use it, but the root user password always seemed to neutralize those annoying windows when I first start up the MBP. But aside from appeasing one said message, the MBP left me alone and everything was fine.
I recently experimented with moving my iTunes folder to the Users/Shared folder to see if 2 different users can access the same library. I got a message that the test user that I set up didn't have permission to open iTunes to said iTunes folder...even after I changed the permissions of the folder to read & write for the test user specifically.
I also noticed that since moving that iTunes folder, my system started getting that spinning color wheel. So I removed Caches from all libraries and Removed launch agents and daemons from the root library... and finally the contents of the ~Keychain folder. Nothing drastic. Just stuff that I knew my hard drive could reproduce. When I restarted, I was still getting the keychain messages AND when I went to empty the trash, there was NO content! And when I tried to download a resume.docx from an email, I got a message that my startup drive was out of space. Bullcrap. Of 250 GB, the partition had 60 GB free. I can't even take a screen shot of the "Other details & Tags" portion of this post where I wrote "Los Lonely Boys are terrible" because my startup disk is so full.
I first used Terminal to sudo empty the trash -- no improvement. I then reinstalled Mavericks -- and when that didn't resolve the issue either, I figured I'd reindex spotlight. Because the hard disk was allegedly almost full, it took 7 hours. Issue persisted. I couldn't even start to Safe Mode. I got a message saying "Unapproved Caller. Securty Agen may only be infoked by Apple Software." (I'm using a legit copy of Mavericks, btw -- it's free, so what's the point of pirating?) So now, I'm erasing and migrating my User Data back on.
The only thing I can think of is either that I had a virus (in which case I'd like to know where in the filing system of my last Time Machine backup I could look for it) or I just user-errored that crap out of this thing.
I have no angry responses to your suggestions waiting as I don't get frustrated about computer matters anymore, plus, I'm fixing it one way or another with a computabotomy. So any meditations and rhetorical answers are welcome and appreciated.

You can check out your hard drive size and available space in Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.
Click on the named boot volume (Macintosh HD unless you've changed it) and look at the bottom of the pane to find the capacity and available space. What does it say?
I haven't used it, but some people recommend WhatSize to find out what may be taking up hard drive space:
http://whatsizemac.com/

Startup Disk Memory Inexplicably Low/Missing

I normally keep a close eye on the amount of info going into my partitioned Mac HD (presently: capacity 29.88 GB, 27.64 Used, 2.23 Available), but I received a message today to the effect that "your startup disk is low in available memory..." while only running Safari... The last time I had checked (about 1 month ago) I had between 9 and 10 GB of available space, so needless to say I was rather surprised to get this message. I immediately did a "Get Info" on the drive and was SHOCKED for TWO reasons! 1) that the available memory was so low... but ALSO as I checked and RE-checked the memory was DISAPPEARING before my eyes! I was only running Safari (although a couple hours prior I had worked on and saved a 5+ page site in iWeb with a fair amount of imagery... I have 1 GB of RAM. I restarted and the drive has since stabalized at 2.22-2.23 GB Available. I restarted in Safe Mode and restarted again and ran a repair permissions on it. All seems to be ok for now BUT I haven't reopened iWeb for fear that that may be eating up what little memory is left AND then there is this OTHER issue of where these other 8 or so GB have gone to???? When I calculate Finder items in the HD they total 19.5 GB not the 27.64 that "Get Info" pulls up for it. One more note: I installed iLife '06 about a month ago... What is happening here?
PowerBook G4 17" Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Hi, O.
1. IMO, with only 2-3 GB of available (free) space, you're critically short of free disk space. Cache files and virtual memory swap files could readily and quickly consume that. See my "Problems from insufficient RAM and free hard disk space" FAQ.
2. A runaway process constantly writing to log files can chew up disk space. Check these Console logs for clues, specifically large blocks of repeating messages that recur at high-frequency. If you find such blocks, post some samples for diagnosis. Again, do not post the entire log or logs, just copy/paste samples of blocks of repeating messages that recur at high frequency.
Common causes of runaway processes writing to logs include software associated with Canon and HP scanners, software for HP All-In-One devices, and Adobe Acrobat version 7.x prior to version 7.0.5. Depending on the messages you post, I can give you specific actions to take if one of those apply.
3. See also my "Freeing Space on your Mac OS X startup disk" FAQ.
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:
I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

Need to increase startup disk memory

My hard drive is full so I installed the time machine so I can backup my files.
Now, i frequently get a message that i need to make more space for my startup disk.
How can I safely make space and what are some of the files or application I can remove to increase space?

Well, you're addressing two separate issues here. First, running backups with Time Machine is very sensible, but do understand that it's intended as a backup, not an archive. That is, you should always have two copies of your files - the original, and the backup. Therefore, don't delete any important files from your main drive, since you will then only have one copy (which is NOT a safe backup!)
Second, your hard drive space. How large is your current drive? You may benefit from simply installing a larger drive. It's a technical operation on a PowerBook, so you may want to find a local tech if you're not comfortable disassembling your Mac. If you don't want to take that step yet, run OmniDiskSweeper to find out which files and folders are taking up the most space. If you have iDVD and/or GarageBand installed, and don't use them, you can remove their large template/loop files from the /Library/Application Support folder. You might also shave off a couple of GB running MonoLingual. But these are really stopgap solutions, and ultimately, a larger HD may well be the solution.
Matt

Runaway cups tmp files causing full startup disk

Hi there,
Summary of my question: How do I prevent /private/var/spool/cups/tmp from filling up my wife's hard drive?
Details:
My wife's 12-inch PowerBook G4 (10.4.8) was giving her "startup disk is almost full" errors, and I found out (using this handy tip) that the culprit was the /private/var/spool/cups/tmp directory: there were 20 or 30 GB of files in there. I don't know what they're for, although based on this post I guess they might have been job history files. So I deleted them (from the terminal, using sudo), and updated the cupsd.conf file as suggested in the post. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if that actually fixed things, or if I'll need to go back and delete these files again sometime.
So my question is this: how do I prevent these files from being generated? This post says not to run server admin 24/7, but my wife's not running it at all (at least not to our knowledge), much less 24/7.
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
--GP

Never mind--discovered a phantom printer job (said it was still printing, but also said "The process 'hppostprocessing' terminated unexpectedly on signal 10") that presumably was causing all the grief.

PowerBook G3 PDQ Loses Startup Disk on Cold Boot

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