Question mark flashes when Mac boots what's wrong?

[fastbilly1]

Grab one of the PPC builds of linux and boot it as a live cd to check out the harddrive and wipe if needed. This happened to mine and I had to wipe the os from Linux. As far as I know this is caused by bad sectors on the harddrive - but remember the last time I really worked on Macs heavily was OS7 - which you can now run in a browser...

[CRTGAMER]

Perhaps get another cheap used, for example a 60gb IDE drive, definitely under 127gb. Try a fresh install of original OSX on that replacement drive. OS9 doesn't take that much room, can happily live in there along with OSX. Does come in handy when a program requires it, automatically loading under OSX.

[Niode]

You did install the PPC version of OS X didn't you? 10.6 isn't even compatible with PPC (at all) and leopard requires hacks to install properly. The only version of OS X I got running on my G3 was 10.3, I couldn't get 10.4 to work properly at all.

[CRTGAMER]

You did install the PPC version of OS X didn't you? 10.6 isn't even compatible with PPC (at all) and leopard requires hacks to install properly. The only version of OS X I got running on my G3 was 10.3, I couldn't get 10.4 to work properly at all.

10.4.11 Tiger is on my iMac G3. Memory is maxed with two 512mb cards.

Good point from Niode, the Leopards regular and snow won't work.
Tiger is the newest OSX that will run in a G3, invest in an internal DVD drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_T ... quirements

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

You did install the PPC version of OS X didn't you? 10.6 isn't even compatible with PPC (at all) and leopard requires hacks to install properly. The only version of OS X I got running on my G3 was 10.3, I couldn't get 10.4 to work properly at all.

10.4.11 Tiger is on my iMac G3. Memory is maxed with two 512mb cards.

Good point from Niode, the Leopards regular and snow won't work.
Tiger is the newest OSX that will run in a G3, invest in an internal DVD drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_T ... quirements

Yeah, I installed 10.4.11 (4 CD Version) on my Mac and had 512MB of RAM in it (Though I planned on maxing it out at 1GB before all hell went loose) so it ran comfortably and without any problems.

This all seemed to go down after I installed the 2009-0005 update for Tiger, when the Mac went to automatically reboot after it finished installing was when I began to have issues.

[Niode]

Hold Command+V while booting the system up. It will start in verbose mode and should tell you what the problem is. Failing that, pop you OS X install CD in, and hold C on start up it will boot directly into the installer. You can run Disk Utility and a bunch of other diagnostic tools from this screen (depending on the version you have you might have to click through the language options first before you can load Disk Utility from the menu at the top of the screen).

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

Hold Command+V while booting the system up. It will start in verbose mode and should tell you what the problem is. Failing that, pop you OS X install CD in, and hold C on start up it will boot directly into the installer. You can run Disk Utility and a bunch of other diagnostic tools from this screen (depending on the version you have you might have to click through the language options first before you can load Disk Utility from the menu at the top of the screen).

Nono, see it refuses to boot my copy of the OS X CD. I just get a silver Screen with a gray Apple logo and a spinning loading emblem and it just decides to hang. The same happens with my copy of Mac OS 9.2.2 as well.

I did not, nor will I ever pay for any of Steve Jobs' operating systems so don't assume I got any "spare" discs at all with this Mac.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

Sounds like the logic board might be going kaputs on you.

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

YAYS!

The screen was flickering slightly the other day after I had installed OS X.

[Niode]

Hold Command+V while booting the system up. It will start in verbose mode and should tell you what the problem is. Failing that, pop you OS X install CD in, and hold C on start up it will boot directly into the installer. You can run Disk Utility and a bunch of other diagnostic tools from this screen (depending on the version you have you might have to click through the language options first before you can load Disk Utility from the menu at the top of the screen).

I did not, nor will I ever pay for any of Steve Jobs' operating systems so don't assume I got any "spare" discs at all with this Mac.

Riiiight