Mat on Macs

So to get the Home Server Project started I obviously needed the server. At first I thought about going with a Linux server running on an old Athlon PC I happened to have from the bad old days from before I saw the Mac light. However, after playing around a bit with Ubuntu I decided to just go with what I know–OS X. Now ideally I would be running OS X Server, but I’m not willing to drop $200+ on the project so I’ll just have to go with a regular client version of OS X which nonetheless has a lot of server features available, and which can of course be upgraded with lots of open source server tools. Since I’m doing this project on a shoestring budget I was wondering what sort of Mac I could get for $100 or less. Some eBay searching revealed that 500-600 GHz G3 iMacs were generally going for about $150 and I didn’t want to pay that much. As luck would have it, however, I found a 400 MHz graphite iMac DV SE without a hard drive, but with 512MB of RAM for $68. The RAM was important because OS X is very memory hungry and I didn’t really want to buy it (in fact, at Crucial.com a 512MB stick for this machine runs about $100). Anyway, I bought the iMac and it was delivered a few days later–with shipping it totaled about $100.

My original plan was to go out a buy a cheap 120GB hard drive to put into the iMac, but once I had it in my possession I realized that I had another old, dead PC whose parts could be scavenged for the iMac. I grabbed a 60GB drive (for which I remember paying $250 about 5 years ago!) and another 256MB stick of RAM out of the PC which left me with 768MB total; not bad for an ancient iMac, and I’ve still spent just under $100.

So of course I pop the OS X 10.4 Tiger disc into the drive and begin the install. Then I get this message that tells me my firmware is not up to date and so OS X can’t install. I have to reboot into OS 9 (which of course I don’t have) to install the firmware update. Fortunately, I have a buddy who’s an old Mac hand and a quick email to him had the OS 9 install discs coming my way. Wanting to play with it a bit while I waited I tried to see if I could just boot Tiger off the DVD and format the HD, etc. Boy was I in for a surprise. The computer would come on–chime–then shut off. I tried again, same deal. At this point I go to google and find the suggestion that it may be the BIOS battery. Someone suggests pulling it out and putting it back in to reset the PRAM. So I do. Big Mistake. This of course doesn’t fix it and a little more googling reveals a huge problem. Evidently, trying to install OS X on an iMac without the latest 4.1.9 firmware puts the iMac’s video board in a mode that it cannot handle and right after POST it shuts itself down. I find out that sometimes you can recover from this, if you haven’t reset the PRAM, which is of course exactly what I did when I pulled the battery.

Well now I’m stuck. There’s nothing actually physically wrong with the computer, but it won’t start up long enough for me to install OS 9 and then the required firmware update which will fix it. It’s starting to look like I’m just out my $100. The first thing I try is getting a new BIOS battery as that one was dead. Of course being Apple this is some insane, off the wall 1/2 AA Lithium battery. The Rat Shack has them, but they want $15 for it and I’m thinking it’s not worth spending more money if I’m not sure I can get this thing going. Well, anyway, I find this place Batteries Plus that gives the battery for $9, but it still doesn’t fix the problem. Searching around online some more I discover some reason for hope. Some guys have managed to “resurrect” an iMac in similar condition through a hardware hack involving bypassing the internal video and using an external monitor. However, this requires jumping some pins on the internal video connector. Fortunately, it turns out that the old mac floppy drive cable fits the connector perfectly.

So now my problem is to just to find an old mac floppy drive cable. Some searching online gives me some leads, but on a lark I try calling my local Mac dealer to see if he might have one. After describing the cable (20 pins, two rows of 10) it turns out that he does and is willing to sell it to me for $10. That’s annoying, but I go over there and sure enough it’s the right cable–Apple P/N: 590-4529 A. So now that I’ve got the cable I completely disassemble the iMac following some good directions found online and proceed to do the hack. I make the connections and hit the power button–and she comes on and stays on! I’m really happy now, but when I look at the 20″ Dell widescreen I’ve plugged it into I get this message: D-Sub Can’t Display this Mode. Argh! My monitor can’t display a low enough resolution and I don’t have an old CRT anymore, so I’m stuck again.

However, I then realized that at work I have an old 17″ CRT that might work. So I box everything up and cart it off to work. It turns out the video does work on the CRT, but it’s completely unreadable. Furthermore, once I get the OS 9 discs it doesn’t even want to boot off of them. I’m getting discouraged at this point and am about to give up when I turn the machine over one last time to discover that the IDE cable for the DVD drive is loose and that’s what’s preventing it from booting off of the CD. Well, plug that in and try again, and sure enough it boots and I get to the OS 9 Installer screen on the external monitor.

But now the unreadability is a huge problem. I can read it well enough to see that it has booted OS 9, but I cannot see it well enough to read anything on the screen. Keep in mind that at this point I still needed to format the new hard drive and install OS 9. After trying randomly clicking around to install OS 9 on the hard drive I’m about to give up again. Then on a lark I figured I’d just plug the internal monitor cable back in, just for the heck of it. So I do and I get perfect video on the external monitor! At this point I’m home free. I install OS 9, install the Firmware update and bring the machine home. At this point it will boot OS 9 perfectly to the internal monitor.

So now all I have to do is install Tiger and the updates to 10.4.4 and voila:

At this point I christen my new Mac CUPERTINO and we’re ready for step two of the Home Server Project, the router/firewall. Total cost: ~$125 (and lots of beating my head against the wall while cursing). End result: iMac G3 400 running OS 10.4.4 (client) with 768MB RAM, 60GB HD, DVD. Not bad, I’m thinking.