Please help beige G3 MT.

[TGA]

Hi I recently got my hands on this OLD G3. It is suppose to have OSX installed on it but I don’t know what version. I spent the past week getting a keyboard and mouse as well as a video adapter for it.

Last night while I was making dinner a friend of mine decided he wanted to hook it up and turn it on. He tells me that it said booting to OSX and got to initializing network. So we left it sit and sat down to eat dinner. When we finished and went back to have a look at the Mac, we found it sitting at a blank desktop. The mouse worked but there was nothing on the screen. We sat with it for a few min and it didn’t seem to be doing anything. So he reset the power and now all it does is load to a grey apple screen.

I know nothing about Mac’s and after searching the net all night I am still not getting anywhere.

So does anyone have any suggestions on what I should try?

 

[illgiveumorality]

If you have the OS X install discs, go ahead and do a fresh install on the hard drive, unless something is important on there.

In G3's, the solution to everything is ram, my dad's still runs fine with 768mb of ram in there.
Ram should be cheap too.

 

[TGA]

I read a lot of post last night where people recommended booting from the OSX disk and running some disk checker. However I didn’t get any disks with the tower when it was given to me. Since it wasn’t my PC I would do clean install if I had the disks but I do not. Right now I would just like to find some way to get this thing to boot to the desktop but I haven’t a clue what to try. Is there a safe mode or something I might be able to try?

Sorry I haven’t used a Mac since I was in school and I believe that was before os9. If someone knows where I could get a used copy of 10.2 rather cheep I will consider buying it. I just don’t want to invest much money in to this old thing. I don’t mind wasting my time though. Assuming I can get this thing to boot and I like OSX I will buy a mini and pass this G3 on to someone who can use it.

Thanks

 

[TGA]

Oh one more thing, I assume this grey apple screen it just sits at is some sort of splash screen. I also assume it isn’t locking up since the animation keeps going. Is there some way I can bypass this splash screen and see what it is doing and where in the boot up process it is getting stuck?

 

[TH3F4T4LON3]

if its truly os x (have doubts) u can try olding option, then 2 icons will popup, a HD should startup, see if clicking the HD works (takes a while to load). if you can, pictures of intial startup (loading screen) to the current state your describing?