Philosophy of the Arts

Technical

Upgrading my iMac

I have just upgraded a three year old Strawberry (Rev. A, 266Mhz) tray-loading iMac with more RAM (from 96 to 640Mb) and a larger HD (from 6 to 40Gb) using this excellent How to upgrade an iMac, from Macworld.
Of course, after this hardware upgrade, I want to run OS X on this machine.

Troubles, no. 1

This iMac isn’t Airport-ready. Previously, I used the Proxim Skyline 747 USB Adapter to connect an antenna through the USB port, which connected wirelessly to my Airport base station. (Described in this MacCentral-article).This works fine under OS 9.2, but it doesn’t seem to work under OS X’s Classic OS 9.2. Now what?
This is how I ‘solved’ the wireless problem. I decided to keep the iMac running under Os 9.2, even though there is enough RAM and diskspace to run OS X (damned). The wireless works fine over the Skyline USB Adapter, and we live.

Troubles, no. 2

In fact, this was my first problem, but I solved it, so, no need to put it first. I succeeded in installing OS X, 10.2, as well as OS 9.2.2. And, watching things from the OS 9 installer disk I could even see how the hard disk was filled with exactly the files I’d expect. Yet, the computer didn’t boot from it.
I did some hard thinking to find out what was wrong, even tried to upgrade the firmware (How does one do that if it must be upgraded from the local disk holding the startup system, and your trouble is that you cannot boot from the local disk? I solved that by removing the HD, replacing the old one, and … finding out there was no need to upgrade the firmware.)
I removed OS X and installed OS 9.2 only, with no results.
I talked to people in the known, but we were flabbergasted. All we could come up with was the idea that, possibly the HD was the cause of the problem.
One phone call to MailaMac, where I bought the HD taught that that, indeed, was the case: there is a dip switch on the HD which standardly is set to ‘slave’. It should set to ‘Master. (I wish they had told me up front). So the booting problem was solve.

Troubles, no. 3

There is a problem with the RAM chips as well. You’ll need a so-called low-profile chip for the lower slot, and a high profile chip for the top slot. I found me a 512 Mb chip for the bottom slot and placed it there, and a 128Mb one for the top slot and placed it. The chips work, but the iMac apparently cannot perceive more than 256Mb at the bottom slot. Well, it works, so I’ll quit complaining.

Yet, if anyone among you all knows how I could reconnect this computer, if it runs under OS X, to my wireless network, please tell me.

You must be logged in to post a comment.