need some help/input with an ibook...

[iconboy]

hey all

my friend got an ibook and lets just say he didnt tell me where he got it from or who he got it from, just that it cost $400 CND. Yeah, I know shady, right? anyways I dont know much about Macs but Ive wanted one for a while, So he gives me this ibook and asks if i can take a look at it for him to see whats on it and if it was worth $400.

Ok So i brought it home, plugged it in and booted it up. The ibook looks amazing, very well taken care of , AND it looks like a top of the line ibook, a really new model. So its starts up and it boots into OS 9.2, wtf!? i was expecting OSX, weird... anyways.. there are a crap load of files on the desktop, I see there looks like 3 drives on the desktop labeled:

Mac 9.0

Mac OSX 1.5

File Storage

Fonts

Not sure whats up with those, but looks like a hint that osx might be on the laptop? im not sure some insight from you mac gurus would be greatly appreciated.

I have no idea how to tell whats in this thing as far as hardware is concerned ;) I right away try to look for something like 'control panal' or 'system properties' eventually i get frusterated and goto help which took me to a screen that showed me everything on the ibook. From what i can tell the ibook is a G3 700Mhz, 640Mb RAM, DVD/CDRW combo, 16Mb ATI card and it doesnt appear to have wireless :(

So 2 questions real quick do i think it was worth my friend paying $400 CND for this? AND does this thing have enough juice to run OSX? worth the purchase? Or should she sell it and try to put that money into a new mac? i know the most she will use it for is word processing and maybe watching a DVD.... ok i know, more than 2 question ;) oh well...

[jamend]

It's worth the $400 and it can run OS X fine. No idea what those folders would be though (OS X 1.5???). You'll probably want to buy Tiger for it anyways.

[iconboy]

so its worth the investment in OSX even though its just a G3 cpu? also is it hard to format the whole thing and start clean. I have a feeling that there is one hdd in there that is partitioned into 3 ... hmmmm

[jamend]

You'll be able to take care of it pretty easily with the OS X installer's disk partitioning tools. The G3 iBook will run Tiger fine, although Core Image won't run at its full potential (but then again, neither would any iBook). G3s aren't bad at all, especially not at 700 MHz.

[iconboy]

i opened the drive marked "Mac OS X.1.5" and it has a number of files:

5 folders: Applications, automount, Desktop, Library, System and Users

5 files: etc, mach, mach.sym, mach_kernel and var

cant see any extensions, but these files look like system files of some sort, do u guys think its possible that OSX is on this drive, but its booting to 9.2? is there a way to check this while the system boots?

[jamend]

Ah, sorry, I misread your original post (I thought they were folders). The Mac OS X drive does have Mac OS X on it, so you just have to tell OS 9 to boot to that installation instead... although I can't remember how to do that.

[iconboy]

i did some google searches and found bits and pieces on something called "classic mode" do you think that the ibook is simply in classic mode? how do i get out of it?

[jamend]

No, Classic mode is something that runs within OS X to run old stuff. You're actually within the old stuff, so you need to change the boot preference to OS X and then reboot. I think it's just called the startup disk or something like that.

Edit: Ah, found it:

1. Booting ("start up" as called by article 86209 above) into Mac OS 9 - which from Mac OS X is done by selecting

Mac OS 9 System Folder from Apple menu -> System Preferences -> Startup Disk and hitting restart. This gives you the full compatibility of Mac OS 9 compatible drivers. Restarting back into Mac OS X is done through Apple menu -> Control Panels -> Startup Disk. This is NOT called Classic.

http://www.macmaps.com/macosxnative.html

Edited April 13, 2005 by Cephas

[iconboy]

thanks for your help :) I managed to access "startup disk" and changed it to OSX now it boots into OSX :)

why someone would choose to boot into OS 9.2 is beyond me :p