2002 – I was going to spend last Wednesday putting a bigger, faster hard drive in our Beige Power Mac G3 and tell everyone what a big difference it made on Thursday. Well, things didn’t work out that way.
Instead, I spent much of Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, half of Sunday, and much of today trying to put a faster, higher capacity hard drive in our Beige G3 with very little luck at all – and none of that luck has involved Mac OS X.
Murphy’s Law tells us that if anything can go wrong, it will. Finagle’s Law says the universe tends toward maximum entropy. In the face of that, things can even go wrong with Macs. And believe me, they did
The Hardware
The Beige G3 was released in November 1997 and is the oldest Mac that Apple officially supports under Mac OS X. Upgrading this hardware for decent OS X performance is important, since there are a lot of them out there and Apple is pushing Mac users to migrate to OS X.
Engst looked at several ways to get Mac OS X Lion (10.7) installed, a popular goal since it supports iCloud services and is usually the latest version of Mac OS X that these machines can handle. Shop for mac os x at Best Buy. Find low everyday prices and buy online for delivery or in-store pick-up.
When you upgrade to macOS Catalina, you get more of everything you love about Mac. Experience dedicated apps for music, TV, and podcasts. Smart new features in the apps you use every day. And Sidecar, which lets you use iPad as a second Mac display. Best of all, upgrading is free and easy. Mac OS X automatically generates a short name for use as your screen and Buddy name in iChat AV and various network applications. The short name is also the name of the folder that Mac OS X creates on the computer’s hard drive for this user. You can keep the default short name or type a new one, but it must not contain any spaces.
I had three hard drives I wanted to test in the 266 MHz Beige G3: a 20 GB Seagate Barracuda, a 30 GB IBM Deskstar, and an 80 GB Western Digital with an 8 MB buffer. These are ATA66 or ATA100 drives, spin at 7200 rpm, and provide 5x to 20x the storage space of the nearly full 4 GB Quantum drive that came with the G3.
The 8 GB Limit
The first problem to raise its head was the 8 GB bootable OS X partition limitation of certain Macs, including the beige G3, WallStreet PowerBooks, and tray-loading iMacs. In short, if you use a drive larger than 8 GB in one of these models, you must partition it. Mac OS X must be installed on a partition within the first 8 GB of drive space.
The simple solution is to create an 8 GB (or slightly smaller) first partition and leave the rest of the drive for everything else.
The first time around, I forgot to do this. I repartitioned the drive using Disk Utility on OS X 10.1.5 Puma, dragging the size of the first partition to about 8 GB, and then manually typing in 8.0 to set the partition size. That didn’t work either. It seems Disk Utility doesn’t care what you type in as the partition size; it only looks at the dragged setting.
Third try I created a 7.81 GB first partition, cloned everything on the 4 GB drive to it using Carbon Copy Cloner – and it still wouldn’t boot into Mac OS X. Oddly, it would boot into Mac OS 9.2.2 from any of these configurations.
The IDE Bus
I’ve been working with Macs since the late 1980s and have installed a lot of hard drives – internal and external, SCSI and IDE. It’s usually easy on the Mac, even when you have to make a change or two to get things working. So I tried putting the drive on the end of the second bus, the start of the second bus, and on the first bus. I set it to slave, master, and cable select.
Nothing made a bit of difference.
The Acard Hcard arrived lastWednesday – maybe that would solve the problem. The Hcard is an Ultra66 PCI card for the Mac that has two IDE buses and claims to be OS X compatible. The card simulates a SCSI bus as far as your Mac is concerned, but it uses less costly IDE drives. I’ve worked with similar cards before, and this one now sells below the US$60 mark.
Put in the card, connect the drive, repartition once more just to play it safe, run Carbon Copy Cloner, boot from OS X on the new drive.
Same thing – no bootable HFS partition. I am getting so tired of that error message!
Upgrade Despair
It was so easy replacing the drive in my TiBook. And it’s always been easy to drop another drive – or even drive-and-controller-card – into a Mac running the classic Mac OS.
What Is The New Os X For Mac
What has Apple done differently with OS X to create such trials and tribulations?
There is a known issue with multiple devices on the IDE bus for Revision A Beige G3s (ROM revision $77D.40F2), but this is a Rev. B that works just fine with two devices on the second bus. I can’t even get it to work when the drive is the only device on the bus.
Still, the fact remains that these drives boot flawlessly into OS 9, so it can’t be a simple hardware issue. I’m at a loss. And at this point, OS X is even broken on the old Quantum drive.
Calling For Help
Running stuck, I asked for help on G-List, our email list for people using G3- and G4-based Macs. The best advice seemed to be reinstalling OS X, so that’s what I’ve been trying to do.
Trying. And trying. And trying.
It isn’t working. I’ve tried installing 10.0 on the existing partition with all the data intact – and after completely wiping the partition. The installer loads, runs, and refuses to complete the job. I don’t own a full copy of 10.1, let alone Jaguar, so this is the only way I can reinstall OS X. I keep getting an unspecified error during installation.
Funny thing is, it worked once upon a time – otherwise I never would have been able to have OS X on this machine’s original 4 GB hard drive in the first place. Something is very, very wrong here.
Sometimes the old Beige G3 won’t even see the internal CD-ROM drive, so I’ve tried using external SCSI drives. No joy there either.
I’ve tried using Disk First Aid, Norton Utilities 7, TechTool Deluxe, and Disk Warrior. Nothing helps. And after all of this, even the OS 9 install has broken.
I miss the good old days of being able to simply drag a System Folder from one drive to another and having it work.
XPostFacto
My last resort is XPostFacto, formerly known as UnsupportedUtilityX. Ryan Rempel’s installer not only lets you put OS X on officially unsupported software, but it’s supposed to solve some install problems on some supported Macs as well. “Ordinarily, Mac OS X should just work with the Beige G3, but there are some cases in which the Beige G3 has problems that XPostFacto may be able to help with.”
By this time, everything had degenerated to the point where I couldn’t reliably boot from the hard drive or CD-ROM. The monitor was staying black almost all the time. Time for drastic measures.
Yet even though I’d downloaded XPostFacto, I never did have to use it.
It Finally Works
I shut down and pulled all three sticks of RAM, removed the two PCI cards, took out the PRAM battery, reset the cuda switch, put the battery back in, dropped in a single 128 MB DIMM, hit the cuda again, and tried to boot. No joy.
Ran out to Meijer, bought a CD-ROM drive cleaner, cleaned the CD-ROM twice (we’d never done it before), and tried to boot. Still had a black screen.
Checked the back of the computer. The monitor, an Apple Multiple Scan 17, was connected – but not quite tight. I tightened it up, and voilà, everything worked!
I managed to boot into OS 9, set the date & time, connect to our home ethernet network, and mount the OS X 10.0 install CD. Run the installer, reboot to launch it from the CD (the 24x Apple drive is loud!), and let it do its thing. It took long enough to enjoy lunch, but it got Mac OS X 10.0 installed.
Next step: Shut down, add the other two RAM modules, drop in the USB card, reboot, and run the 10.1 update CD. It’s working perfectly. That done, it was time to install the security update and the updates to bring it to 10.1.5.
After that I can leave the whole thing alone for a while. I don’t want to try another hard drive in it. I don’t want to play with CPU upgrades and overclocking. I don’t want to try the FireWire card or the Acard Hcard Ultra66 drive controller card. I just want to have it up and running so my son Tim can use it for a few day.
Maybe then I’ll feel like tackling it again.
Closing Thoughts
None of this explains why Carbon Copy Cloner didn’t work. After all, the looseness of the monitor plug or a dirty lens on the CD-ROM drive shouldn’t have the least thing to do with the process of cloning OS X to another drive.
Nor does any of this explain why sometimes the Mac wouldn’t even see that the CD-ROM drive was present. A dirty lens might prevent it from mounting a CD, but the computer should still recognize that the drive is attached.
In the end, I guess we have to chalk it up to corrupt preferences – today’s equivalent of blaming SCSI voodoo. Somewhere between zapping the PRAM (dozens of times), removing the battery, and resetting the cuda, whatever had been causing the problem seems to have disappeared.
Yes, it took extreme measures, and I can’t imagine why things weren’t a whole lot easier, but I’m just glad it’s done. We’ll get to testing and other updates later. Until then, it’s running nicely again.
New Os For Macbook
Keywords: #beigeg3 #macosx #osxpuma #8gbpartition
Short link: http://goo.gl/Sfd2YF
So, you’ve decided to download an older version of Mac OS X. There are many reasons that could point you to this radical decision. To begin with, some of your apps may not be working properly (or simply crash) on newer operating systems. Also, you may have noticed your Mac’s performance went down right after the last update. Finally, if you want to run a parallel copy of Mac OS X on a virtual machine, you too will need a working installation file of an older Mac OS X. Further down we’ll explain where to get one and what problems you may face down the road.
A list of all Mac OS X versions
We’ll be repeatedly referring to these Apple OS versions below, so it’s good to know the basic macOS timeline.
| Cheetah 10.0 | Puma 10.1 | Jaguar 10.2 |
| Panther 10.3 | Tiger 10.4 | Leopard 10.5 |
| Snow Leopard 10.6 | Lion 10.7 | Mountain Lion 10.8 |
| Mavericks 10.9 | Yosemite 10.10 | El Capitan 10.11 |
| Sierra 10.12 | High Sierra 10.13 | Mojave 10.14 |
| Catalina 10.15 |
STEP 1. Prepare your Mac for installation
Given your Mac isn’t new and is filled with data, you will probably need enough free space on your Mac. This includes not just space for the OS itself but also space for other applications and your user data. One more argument is that the free space on your disk translates into virtual memory so your apps have “fuel” to operate on. The chart below tells you how much free space is needed.
Note, that it is recommended that you install OS on a clean drive. Next, you will need enough disk space available, for example, to create Recovery Partition. Here are some ideas to free up space on your drive:
- Uninstall large unused apps
- Empty Trash Bin and Downloads
- Locate the biggest files on your computer:
Go to Finder > All My Files > Arrange by size
Then you can move your space hoggers onto an external drive or a cloud storage.
If you aren’t comfortable with cleaning the Mac manually, there are some nice automatic “room cleaners”. Our favorite is CleanMyMac as it’s most simple to use of all. It deletes system junk, old broken apps, and the rest of hidden junk on your drive.
Download CleanMyMac for OS 10.4 - 10.8 (free version)
Download CleanMyMac for OS 10.9 (free version)
Download CleanMyMac for OS 10.10 - 10.14 (free version)
STEP 2. Get a copy of Mac OS X download
Normally, it is assumed that updating OS is a one-way road. That’s why going back to a past Apple OS version is problematic. The main challenge is to download the OS installation file itself, because your Mac may already be running a newer version. If you succeed in downloading the OS installation, your next step is to create a bootable USB or DVD and then reinstall the OS on your computer.
How to download older Mac OS X versions via the App Store
If you once had purchased an old version of Mac OS X from the App Store, open it and go to the Purchased tab. There you’ll find all the installers you can download. However, it doesn’t always work that way. The purchased section lists only those operating systems that you had downloaded in the past. But here is the path to check it:
- Click the App Store icon.
- Click Purchases in the top menu.
- Scroll down to find the preferred OS X version.
- Click Download.
This method allows you to download Mavericks and Yosemite by logging with your Apple ID — only if you previously downloaded them from the Mac App Store.
Without App Store: Download Mac OS version as Apple Developer
If you are signed with an Apple Developer account, you can get access to products that are no longer listed on the App Store. If you desperately need a lower OS X version build, consider creating a new Developer account among other options. The membership cost is $99/year and provides a bunch of perks unavailable to ordinary users.
Nevertheless, keep in mind that if you visit developer.apple.com/downloads, you can only find 10.3-10.6 OS X operating systems there. Newer versions are not available because starting Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.7, the App Store has become the only source of updating Apple OS versions.
Purchase an older version of Mac operating system
You can purchase a boxed or email version of past Mac OS X directly from Apple. Both will cost you around $20. For the reason of being rather antiquated, Snow Leopard and earlier Apple versions can only be installed from DVD.
Buy a boxed edition of Snow Leopard 10.6
Get an email copy of Lion 10.7
Get an email copy of Mountain Lion 10.8
The email edition comes with a special download code you can use for the Mac App Store. Note, that to install the Lion or Mountain Lion, your Mac needs to be running Snow Leopard so you can install the newer OS on top of it.
How to get macOS El Capitan download
If you are wondering if you can run El Capitan on an older Mac, rejoice as it’s possible too. But before your Mac can run El Capitan it has to be updated to OS X 10.6.8. So, here are main steps you should take:
1. Install Snow Leopard from install DVD.
2. Update to 10.6.8 using Software Update.
3. Download El Capitan here.
“I can’t download an old version of Mac OS X”
If you have a newer Mac, there is no physical option to install Mac OS versions older than your current Mac model. For instance, if your MacBook was released in 2014, don’t expect it to run any OS released prior of that time, because older Apple OS versions simply do not include hardware drivers for your Mac.
But as it often happens, workarounds are possible. There is still a chance to download the installation file if you have an access to a Mac (or virtual machine) running that operating system. For example, to get an installer for Lion, you may ask a friend who has Lion-operated Mac or, once again, set up a virtual machine running Lion. Then you will need to prepare an external drive to download the installation file using OS X Utilities.
After you’ve completed the download, the installer should launch automatically, but you can click Cancel and copy the file you need. Below is the detailed instruction how to do it.
STEP 3. Install older OS X onto an external drive
The following method allows you to download Mac OS X Lion, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks.
- Start your Mac holding down Command + R.
- Prepare a clean external drive (at least 10 GB of storage).
- Within OS X Utilities, choose Reinstall OS X.
- Select external drive as a source.
- Enter your Apple ID.
Now the OS should start downloading automatically onto the external drive. After the download is complete, your Mac will prompt you to do a restart, but at this point, you should completely shut it down. Now that the installation file is “captured” onto your external drive, you can reinstall the OS, this time running the file on your Mac.
- Boot your Mac from your standard drive.
- Connect the external drive.
- Go to external drive > OS X Install Data.
Locate InstallESD.dmg disk image file — this is the file you need to reinstall Lion OS X. The same steps are valid for Mountain Lion and Mavericks.
How to downgrade a Mac running later macOS versions
If your Mac runs macOS Sierra 10.12 or macOS High Sierra 10.13, it is possible to revert it to the previous system if you are not satisfied with the experience. You can do it either with Time Machine or by creating a bootable USB or external drive.
Instruction to downgrade from macOS Sierra
Instruction to downgrade from macOS High Sierra
Instruction to downgrade from macOS Mojave
Instruction to downgrade from macOS Catalina
Before you do it, the best advice is to back your Mac up so your most important files stay intact. In addition to that, it makes sense to clean up your Mac from old system junk files and application leftovers. The easiest way to do it is to run CleanMyMac X on your machine (download it for free here).
Visit your local Apple Store to download older OS X version
If none of the options to get older OS X worked, pay a visit to nearest local Apple Store. They should have image installations going back to OS Leopard and earlier. You can also ask their assistance to create a bootable USB drive with the installation file. So here you are. We hope this article has helped you to download an old version of Mac OS X. Below are a few more links you may find interesting.
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