[X4U] iMac

[Randy B. Singer]

On Feb 7, 2007, at 4:44 PM, SE wrote:

> I have an old 333 MHz tray loading iMac. I want to put OSX on it  
> and donate it to the Women's shelter so they can use it for music  
> and photos.
>
> I vaguely remember some discussion about having to put OSX on a  
> certain size partition (maybe 6 GB). Does anyone recall anything  
> about this?
>

When OS X was young, Apple said that OS X was compatible with all Macs
with a G3 processor or greater.  It wasn't really true.  Early G3's  
(including your iMac) had a number of severe incompatibilites
with OS X.

One of the biggest was that you couldn't install OS X on one of these
early G3's if it had a hard drive bigger than 8GB (something that you  
probably want if you are running OS X) without partitioning your hard  
drive so that the first partition was less than 8GB and OS X was put  
on that partition. Unless
you do this, when you go to install OS X on one of these early G3 Macs,
the choice of that drive to install on will be greyed out.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106235

The technical reasons for the 8 GB requirement are interesting:

http://www.macintouch.com/mosxreader10.2pt33.html

There were other problems with early G3's running OS X also.  Things  
like lack of support for built-in graphics processing, poor DVD  
compatibility, PCI cards not working, SCSI not working, and other  
drivers not working.

There was a big class action lawsuit against Apple for this, and Apple
settled. Since then Apple doesn't list the early G3's as being  
compatible
with the most recent versions of OS X.

http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-44573.html

http://www.macintouch.com/mosxreader10.2pt33.html

> And, yes I know it will be very slow but it will do what the  
> shelter knows.

It will be annoyingly slow.

___________________________________________
Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (3rd, 4th, and 5th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html
___________________________________________