Who knew. After all of these years, our early-generation, circa 1999, graphite colored iMacdecided to become…. unstable.
Wow, and I thought only PC’s did that. As best I can recall, this happened once before — a miracle, compared to my (mis)adventures with Win95 and Win98. The disadvantage, though, is that I am far less adept at rebuilding an iMac than I am at a PC. The skills just are not maintained.
I took the iMac down a couple of nights ago – I used one of the sourced utilities to wipe the HD clean and overwrite everything on it. The OS disk that came with it is OS 9.0.4 — ancient, I know. I reloaded it a couple of nights ago.
With a PC, I would then just plugit back into the LAN and re-load off of the internet. LAN? What LAN? asked the iMac. Crap.
So, I hemmed, and I hawed, and I thought about it. I had backed everything up onto an external 80GB firewire drive, to include all of the system stuff I had downloaded the last time I had to do this (yes, I am a packrat). I had even used my PC to dump it to CD / DVD, which of course was a dumb idea as the file names are all trunkated when you put the disk into the Mac.
Oh, and firewire did notautomatically work when I reloaded the OS. Nice.
Pets in a pickle. Scheise.
But, as always happens, I awoke at 0400 this AM, with an idea. To go from 9.0.4 to 9.22 means stopping at 9.1 and 9.2 first. I went and found the .bin for 9.1, loaded it onto a USB flash drive, and hoped for and cheered when the iMac recognized the flash drive and allowed me to load from there. Hoorah.
Loaded 9.1 a little while ago. Been working through some issues with corruption in going to 9.21, but I think I have that beat. Most importantly, in going to 9.1, I got the firewire back. With that, I can conquer a small nation — an iMac should be a walk in the park.
Wife just woke up. Told her that, later, when I tell her I am going to take a nap, she had better not say shit to me about it. Her iMac, my lack of sleep. She, smartly, acknowledged.
December 24th, 2005 at 7:14 am
[...] I’m not a total strangers to Macs — been tech support on them for my wife for 10+ years. We’ve got two in the house now — a retired OS 9 iMac, and a new iMac G5. [...]