I just got a FREE G4 with monitor, mouse, keybord and external zip drive. i took it home and tried to boot it to no avail. i didnt get anything on the monitor. when i open it up i see i dont have any ram. So my question is even with no RAM should i get a post screen or somthing ?? i know nothing about macs and took this one to learn somthing new. but if that is normal were is the best place to buy RAM ?
how can i tell what hardware i have? or will i need ram first? i dont know anything about this thing and i would like to know more before i buy RAM
somewhere on it there should be a sticker or label that has its specs on it. usually underneath. that would be a good place to start.
You could always stick 64MB of RAM in to get to System Profiler, but there should be a sticker indicating model (I thought it was on the back of PMs) Alternatively you can use www.apple-history.com and guesstimation to figure out a possible specification. (Check 1999 - 2003)
ok i got some ram in it and when i turn it on i get a folder with the mac double face symbol and a question mark flashing on it. im guessing that means the OS got wipped ? am i gona have to buy the os for it again ?
You could buy it yeah, but afaik (Don't quote me on this) you can download a copy of whatever OS came with the machine legally. All apple computers come with OS X (Or it might be OS 9 for that machine) anyway, so if you download the version it came with you'll be ok. I'm thinking it most likely came with OS 9 and OS X 10.1, although it may have only been OS 9 (Although highly unlikely it being a G4). Some pictures would be nice
well i got an osx disk and tried to install but the hard drive is dead but im about to order a new one now. but as i wait, for it is it possible to back up the OSX disk on a PC ??
Yer I think so, just creatw a disk image .iso file and it shoud ljust copyall of it over and not alter it in any way... Just simply copy it over...
in theory, it being a cd/dvd, you could try and back it up as a .iso... but why bother, the install media is pretty durable... unless you mean backup files to a windows pc, in which case you can just connect to it by network on copy the files in either direction... you can also use fat formatted hard drives to go back and forth externally or internally, but not ntfs as os x doesn't write to them if I remember correctly. also, you can format a hard drive in fat32 no matter how big using os x's disk utility (I've got a 100gb fat32 laptop external firewire drive that I use for my music backup between my pc & macs)
ok, ill save trying to back it up until i get it to work when i try to install OSX when i get to the select destitination part of the install, but the only thing there is the cd drive. should i be able to select the hard drive ?? anybody got any idea what is wrong ? this is a brand new hdd
you should be able to use the disk utility in the install disks to partition and format the drive, which you will need to do prior to installing OS X in the menu bar of the installer, you should see utilities from where you can choose the disk utility
np.... i would hope i'd be pretty useful when it comes to macs... afterall... my brother did write a book on how to use them
He's co-author on Running Mac OS X Tiger... O'Reilly It's actually really helpful and provides a lot of insight for someone looking to get more out of their mac than just using it for typing etc. There's a version written for every version of OS X as well.. so you can find one for panther etc if you're not using 10.4
