Background
So, one weekend I took a pretty random trip to the local Vancouver Flea Market and was browsing around, not really expecting anything interesting. I was more or less hoping for some kind of old rare Apple-related goodies, or any kind of interesting synth/audio hardware.
I had gone through nearly the entire place before I spotted a bunch of computer stuff (keyboards, some old small CRT monitors) a few tables away, and went over to check it out. Mostly a bunch of crappy old Pentium machines and the like – trivial to attain and of no notable value to me. However, I then spotted this little iMac sitting half-hidden away, no keyboard or mouse or anything. Dude wanted $75 for it, but all I had on me was $40. Fortunately he was okay with that (probably better than having to carry the damn thing home again, I guess). Pretty good deal. I wasn’t too knowledgeable about the older iMacs, so I figured I was just getting some random old model, and I half expected it to not work properly (even though the seller said it booted up fine and so on). I discovered after opening up the machine that it was, in fact, the Revision A “Bondi Blue” iMac, the very first revision/model of the iMac produced! In damn good condition, at that. Lucky score.
In terms of processor speed, the Rev. A iMac G3 has a 233mhz PowerPC G3 processor, and normally comes with a measly 32MB of RAM. Fortunately this one had been upgraded to hold 160MB. Nothing amazing, but definitely better. What initially threw me off regarding this iMac is that it had 6MB of VRAM. The Rev. A only comes with 2MB, so at first I thought I had a Rev.B. However, after opening up the machine, I found that a previous owner had added 4MB of SGRAM to increase the video memory to 6MB total. Nice!
Plans
This machine had OS 9.2.2 on it, and seemed to have been used by someone all the way up until 2005 or 2006. Lots of files left on the HD, although not much in the way of personal files. Just a few Bookmarks and stuff. Either way, was great to have a fully updated OS 9.2.2 install with a good handful of useful apps installed (even Conflict Catcher 
).
Within probably a couple hours, I determined my first goal: to run OS X on it. After a bit of searching I found that OS X 10.3 “Panther” is considered the best to run on an original iMac G3. Not only is it the last OS X release that will install on this machine, it’s also got a lot of great performance improvements (particularly in terms of GUI rendering & animation). It actually runs faster on the iMac G3 than OS X 10.0, 10.1 or 10.2. Pretty impressive. You don’t really see this happening with the Windows platform often, do you? 
hAcktion
Alright, so I ventured forth to get OS X on this machine. The factory HD is a mere 4GB in size – not nearly enough. I had an old 30GB IDE drive kicking around, so I figured that would be perfect – some space for OS X, and then a whole bunch of space for software and so on.
Now, I’m going to name the drive I used here, because I want people to find my page when they inevitably scour search engines for it. This drive just straight up won’t freaking work in an iMac G3 Rev. A. I don’t know about newer models, but it would simply not work no matter what I tried. Trust me, I tried, and read for literally hours and hours on forums – including in German and Swedish!
So, the drive I tried first? Western Digital WD300 , WD part number WD300BB.
No matter how many times I partitioned this drive (nor how I partitioned it), the iMac would not find the newly installed copy of OS X on the drive. I would eventually just get the flashing “system folder / question mark” icon, indicating the machine’s inability to find a working System folder. Talk about frustrating.
Here are tips for anyone putting a new hard drive in an iMac G3, with the intent to install OS X on it:
- The first paritition must be less than 8GB in size – the iMac G3 Rev A cannot boot system files that are outside the first 8GB of the drive. I highly recommend sizing the first partition to 7GB in Disk Utility on your OS X install CD.
- Do not create your first small partition and then leave the rest as “Free Space”! OS X will not let you create a partition in that free space later on! After I had everything installed and updated, I went to partition the big chunk of free space only to find I was not given any possible way to do so. I don’t have any 3rd party apps to partition with, so I had to re-partition with Disk Utility on the OS X install CD (thus erasing the drive).
- Every time you partition the drive, you will probably need to “Zap the PRAM” by holding Cmd-Option-P-R as the iMac boots (wait until you hear the startup chime again). Unless I did this after partitioning (or installing a different drive), the OS X installer would say “You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume. Mac OS X cannot start up from this volume.”
- Usually, set the drive’s jumpers to “Master”. After scouring a wide variety of forums, this was the consensus. I couldn’t find official Apple documentation on it, however.
The process of getting OS X installed was pretty painful because I tried over and over to get it working, and repeatedly encountering the frustrating flashing question mark icon. I eventually caved and swapped a different drive in – this time an 80GB drive that I didn’t really want to use for the iMac (what iMac G3 needs an 80GB drive?).
Fortunately, after the first time, getting at the HD in the iMac’s internals was fairly easy. Directions that I read online indicated that you have to remove the motherboard (yes that’s my photo) to replace the hard drive. This is not accurate, and I wasted a lot of time doing this when I later realized I absolutely didn’t need to.
Anyway, after tossing in the 80GB HD, OS X installed just the same as the previous 10 some-odd times, but actually booted. Good times.
Future
Next step is to get a fresh copy of Mac OS 9.2.2 on the iMac so I’ve got a full classic Mac environment with this machine. I have a serious archive of old classic Mac games, so it’s obvious that they will all be loaded up. Perhaps if I come across a cheap AirPort card I can toss one in there, but for now, 100mbit ethernet is fine.
Speculation RE: former lives
I’ve actually been wondering if this iMac was once used in a 3d animation studio. There is a Maya logo decal on the case at the top (around the opening for the built-in microhone). This is an obvious clue that a former user was into 3d animation, however what makes me think even more strongly as such is the 4MB VRAM upgrade. I guess a home user might have done this, but even now, I’d wager finding a 4MB stick of SGRAM would be a real hassle, and be expensive. Hard to know. I got a couple names of possible previous owners (from Bookmarks and all that), so I guess if I ever get curious enough, I could always try to find one of them online and ask about the decal.
