i got a g3 recently. its my first mac since the classics, so im not familiar with the internals at all.

i replaced the default apple HD because form what i saw, the scsi cables werent getting plugged into the motherboard anywhere. so i installed 2 IDE drives (20GB and 7GB). the 20GB is the primary drive.

when i boot the mac, i get the smiley mac logo face (not the happy mac, but the smiley logo) and then it switches to a blue folder with a question mark over it, then back to the mac logo, and it keeps going. this means there is no OS installed. sounds right since the drives are from older x86 machines, so they're using fat32.

so i burned the latest ubuntu hoary ppc cd, and stuck it in the drive, rebooted as i held the C key before the mac chime. i still lget the same error, the mac logo and the question mark folder.

as i said in the subject, its a g3 yosemite, the blue and white model. thats about all i know about it. that, and it wont install anything below mac os 8.6

i have a mac os 8.5 cd, i tried booting that as well, but it just stuck me back at the screen with the question mark and the smiley mac logo. so im baffled by this problem.


-edit-
i got it booted by hooking up my cdrw drive. after a long (about 7 or 8 minutes) blank gray screen, the screen goes black, then the background turns white with black text scrolling down. i cant read the text because its flashing so quickly, but from what i can see, its only 2 lines long and its repeated all down the screen in one continuous scroll. the machine wont respond to any input from this point. no power button, bu mac keyboard power button, only the reset button will take it out of this loop.

-second edit-
found out the problem with the repeating scrolling error. its 2 of the 4 sticks of ram i installed, they're bad. so i removed them and im prompted with an openfirmware screen, with some "<draw-rectangle> not found" errors.

alright, no more editing, here is another update.

i got everything setup, the bad ram is out, the default cdrom boots the install cd, so i dont get an openfirmware error now.

now it looks like its actually booting the cd. the screen goes black with a little underscore cursor in the top left corner. after a few second, it pops up with an error:
"/pci@80000000/pci-bridge@d/mac-io@5/ata-3@20000/disk@0:2,yaboot.conf: Unknown or corrupt filesystem

Cant find config file
Welcome too yaboot version 1.3.13
Enter "help" to get some basic information useage
boot:"

and it leaves me at that, and help doesnt do a thing to help me, it just confuses me even more.

nobody here has ever seen this problem or has any hints? google has nothing either. nothing for this specific problem anyway