Which is a shame, because even with the cache disabled and no video card driver installed, the interface was clearly faster.

In one of my attempts to install Panther on my Beige G3, I had a similar experience. I got to some point where the install wouldn’t complete and a reboot (even from the OS9 CD) would only give a system error bomb. The out was a reset. Several attempts got Panther running and I don’t regret a minute of it!

I would caution anyone who wants to attempt installing Panther on their Beige to be prepared for down time. If you can’t live with your G3 being down, don’t try it now. Sometimes the install goes without a hitch, in other cases (like mine) it took about two weeks, four formats of the HD and a lot of hair pulling before it came together.

Happy Macing!

However, this is what I was talking about when I mentioned this being a hobbyist computer. It seems you had uncommonly bad luck with your beige, but even so, the few times when I’ve had to curse and sweat over the beige have actually been kind of fun. I enjoy the troubleshooting and subsequent solution finding. Of course, I don’t have kids!

Enjoy your G5, lucky dog.

Somewhere around 10.2.3, I started hitting nasty performance problems. But the endless upgrade treadmill marched on, and I did too, hoping the problems would be resolved. Then at 10.2.8, something went awry, and I would have problems, mostly not being able to find the boot device, hangs during OS X reinstalls, etc. I bought a new Logic Board, new ROM, nothing seemed to fix it. I elimintated RAM as a cause by swapping with other machines. I got it back up and running for a couple of months, then when I had dual-booted back to Classic, I couldn’t get it to find the OS X volume again – back to re-format, wrestle with install. XPost Facto didn’t even help. I eventually found that my PRAM battery was getting sucked dry. Over the space of a couple of weeks. This happened with both Logic Boards, and didn’t happen under Classic.

That’s when I bought my dual 2GHz G5. I hit my limit, and finally got sick of screwing around with it. I decided that I’d rather spend my evenings with my family, then cussing and sweating over the accursed box, waiting for it to reboot, etc.

$3000 well spent. Worth every penny. Just for the reliable sleep-mode alone. The Beige wouldn’t sleep, so I was constantly rebooting, and booting takes 2-5 minutes. And I couldn’t use iDVD. Bleh.
My teenage son is now using the Beige primarily as an Escape Velocity machine. (does all his other work on a school-provided Windows laptop)

As to the SCSI problems, I agree with the idea to check termination carefully. Often an active terminator can do a good job where as a built-in terminator (set with a jumper) might not be so great. OS X is quite sensitive to termination problems. On my system, the internal scsi bus runs the zip drive fine (at least, i’m pretty sure the zip is on the internal bus..) and I was running a 2GB drive on the external bus to swap files around. Both seemed to be working and mounting fine.

I’ve got a PCI SCSI card, an ATTO ExpressPCI PSC, which is a single channel UltraWide SCSI card that was offered as a BTO option on the original Beige G3s (and a few other models too, iirc). It worked dandy in Jaguar, and seems to be working fine in Panther, though I haven’t put any drives on it yet (thats my plan for after work). It still has the original Apple ROM on it, but I will probably flash the rom to the retail version today, so I can take advantage of driver and firmware updates that ATTO has since made available. Also, the retail firmware activates the external plug on the card, which is disabled by the apple firmware.

These cards are pretty cheap, seem to work fine in OS X (I’ll have a final report on how it works in Panther later today), and offer basic UltraWide capability. It might be a good option for people needing an extra SCSI bus.

John – I’m sure installation will get easier as XPostFacto improves. Ryan is working hard on it, and it is fantastic for an alpha product. Just wait till it hits final release! He did a great job of enabling Jaguar support on the old world macs, and with time, I’m confident that the process for Panther will become just as easy. However, Panther made lots of fundamental changes, and the G3 is a different platform than he is used to working on, so it might take some time before this is a totally streamlined process. But in the meantime, if you are persistant, you should be able to get things running! If you are uncertain, wait a few months and check on XPostFacto’s development, I bet it will be easier by then. Panther is great, but 10.2.8 is no slouch, so don’t feel too rushed.

extract from xpostfacto page :

The internal and external SCSI bus both work. However, there are some users who have trouble with the internal SCSI bus. One thing that you need to double-check is that your SCSI termination is correct, because Mac OS X is picky about that. In general, Mac OS X is sensitive to timing issues on the SCSI bus. Sometimes removing unnecessary devices helps. Also, you will sometimes need to adjust the jumper settings on drives connected to the internal bus, to make sure that they spin up automatically at boot time (the “Disable Unit Attention” jumper is one that sometimes needs to be changed).

more at : http://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/Framework.cfm?page=XPostFacto.html