IOATAController Device Blocking Bus (Never used a mac before)
 

I just bought this Power Mac G4 at a yard sale for 50 bucks. Now, I am somewhat advanced in Windows. However, this is my first Mac. We bought it mainly for parts or to learn about Macs. So when I bolted her up, The loading screen took a long time to load before going into an infinite loop of "IOATAController Device Blocking Bus". Now, I know ATA must be the hard drive. But what does this mean? Also, is there an equivalent to BIOS with Macs? If so, how do I access it? And is there a startup options screen or diagnostics screen to get to? Like I said I've never used a Mac and I haven't officially yet, until I can get this solved.

That message probably indicates a severe hardware problem with the hard drive.
You'll likely need to replace it.

First thing I would do is buy a retail copy of OSX. Probably 10.3 ( Panther )
About $30 on ebay
If the HD is indeed not able to boot the computer it may be just needing to be reformatted and then a fresh install of OSX loaded onto it.
It of course could also be cactus and you may need to replace it - 3.5" ATA .
Insert the CD into the tray , press the start button and hold the C key down until you see the smiley face.
Go to disk utilities and reformat using HFS+.
Then install the OS.
You may need to buy another PRAM battery too - $10

Stewie

Current Macs that use an Intel processor have something called EFI. In the PPC Mac that you have, the "equivalent" of BIOS is Open Firmware. You access it by holding down Command-Option-O-F immediately after powering on.

If you want to experiment with it, hold down those keys, and then when you are booted to it (it will have a whit-ish background and dark lettering), you can type the following commands exactly as shown at the Open Firmware prompt:

reset-nvram
reset-all

After the reset-all command, your computer will reboot. The commands above reset certain variables that are held in Open Firmware. After the reset, these variables will be set at their defaults, which can sometimes clear up some problems.

That's not going to help you, however, or at least it's extremely unlikely to help you.

As mentioned above, you need to replace your hard drive, then buy a Retail copy of OS X (the disc will be colored black) and install a fresh copy on your new hard drive.

If you tell us exactly which Power Mac G4 you have, we can tell you if you are limited to ATA hard drives with sizes less than 128 GB. Some of the earlier Power Mac G4s were limited to ATA-5 on the motherboard ATA bus, and cannot handle large drives. Others can handle large drives just fine.

Nothing so primitive, no. Other than Open Firmware (which is very flexible, I've only barely touched the surface of what you can do in OF above), once you have a valid copy of OS X installed on a working hard drive, you also have access to single user mode.

Trevor

Thanks for all your help and patience guys. I'll learn this all soon. My neighbor lent me some restore and install discs and I was able to get the G4 going. But I went to go watch the Super Bowl and when I came back, it went to this one screen. It was black with a bunch of codes. at the end it said "panic: We are hanging here" So after some struggling to boot from the CD I got back to the restore and install disc. So, I gave a shot to boot the local disk. It worked again! But what if it goes back to the panic screen again? What does it mean? And what does it mean if that screen comes up? Windows language please because remember Windows users have it pretty easy

Well we have already told you that you may have a problem with the hard drive.
I'd look at maybe installing another known good HD and go from there.
You also need a retail copy of OSX not a machine specific version ( unless your neighbours is exactly the same model ) and boot it up from the CD while holding the C key down.
Reformat the HD as HFS+ and install OSX.
We still don't know which model G4 it is either.
If you go here http://www.everymac.com/
and look under the Powermac G4 tab a list should come up.

And as for I think the less said the better.

Stewie

Got it. It was my floppy drive that prevented me from doing anything. It messed up again and I started playing with the IDE slot where the DVD ROM and the floppy connect to the mobo. After that, it worked beautifully and consistent. So I got that now. Now, I have a wireless G network card that I'm using for my XP. Will it work on my Mac? How do I hook it up there? Also, do I need drivers for it? Does Mac even use drivers?!?!?!?

None of the Power Mac G4s ever came with floppy drives. I suspect what you are seeing is an iOmega Zip drive, which was an optional extra with some Power Mac G4s.

It would still be very helpful if you told us more information about which Power Mac G4 you have exactly.

You haven't told us anything at all about this wireless G network card, so how can we tell you if it will work on your Mac?

It is a PCI card? What chipset does it use exactly? Who sells it, and what model number is it? Is there any markings on the PCB?

If it works, the drivers will likely be included with OS X. If they are not, it is unlikely that you will be able to find drivers, so it will not work.

Yes, the Mac uses drivers.

Trevor

Sorry for the vagueness guys. The linksys card is a PCI card. Its model is like WEMPG54 or something like that. I could inspect it but I just don't wanna open the computer anymore. And as for the Mac G4, how do I find which one it is. It's like a graphite color if it helps. Also, I have a 60 gig hd im using for one of my PC's. I wanna change it to a Mac and send the 20 gig HD from the Mac my Pc's way. If I zero out the HD's and follow the steps to intall both, will it work. Also, I have Cd's that say iMac Software Install and Restore (1, 2, 3). Would that work as retail discs? Because that's what I used to reinstall and revive that old G4's HD. Did it clear it up and reinstall? I think it did cuz all I see is 3 GB's being used up. So can I do it? One of the HD's is a Maxtor and the 20 gig is Western Digital.

Got it!! Its a Power Mac G4 7400 (or at least that's what the 400 MHZ are called)

Unfortunately, Linksys changes their card chipsets like people change pants. It's very hard to say if it will work on the Mac. If it is a Broadcom chipset (which is one fairly common chipset often used by Linksys), then it should work. This page, or maybe this one might help you with getting it working if it doesn't work immediately.

It is NOT necessary to zero it out, and that process is quite hard on the drive, so I would not recommend zeroing. Just reformat it for the Mac. Go to Disk Utility (which you can find in your /Applications/Utilities directory if you're booted to another hard drive, or it should be in the Utilities menu if you are booted to an OS X Install disc), go to the Erase tab, select the hard drive that you want to erase on the left, set the Volume Format to "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)", give the drive whatever name you want, and click "Erase". Don't use any of the "Security Options", and don't click "Erase Free Space".

No. You have a Power Mac G4. An iMac is a different type of Mac. The iMac discs will not work. You need the discs that are (or were) purchased in a retail store. They will be colored black, whereas the iMac discs that you have are probably colored gray.

I thought you said that you were getting kernel panics. This may be because of the wrong install media (although there may also be other problems happening with your computer as well to cause kernel panics).

Trevor

No, the 7400 is not correct. It's just the Power Mac G4/ 400 MHz. (Fine print: there's actually three versions of Power Mac G4/ 400 MHz. You can use this page to identify which one you have, if you're interested.)

But since all three versions of Power Mac G4/ 400 Mhz are limited to ATA-5 hard drive sizes on the motherboard ATA, that tells us that if you use hard drives sizes larger than 120 GB, you will be wasting space, as the larger drives will format to 128 GB (or 137 GB, depending on how you count your gigabytes).

In other words, don't bother connecting a hard drive larger than 120 GB to the motherboard. If you need larger size drives, you'll either need to get a PCI card that gives you an ATA bus, or else use larger external FireWire or USB drives.

Trevor

Hey trevor. I did get those panics but once I unplugged the ZIP drive, it all turned out fine. I haven't gotten a panic since (it was probably set as "master" or something" I used those iMac discs and booted from them and installed OS X and I think they were using OS 9. I have an iMac too but I gutted it, put the HD in the G4 and rebolted it up and it worked! So doesn't that mean it worked?

You can sometimes get OSX to load on a machine using the install disks from another model but you may run into problems too that may not be immediately apparent.
Sometimes just a software update ( downloadable from Apple ) can fix it.

Stewie

Ok, thanks guys. While I figure out the network card, can you guys tell me if there is a way to boot to Ubuntu Live Cd with the Mac I got? I've been wanting to experiment with it

If your Ubuntu Live CD is for PPC machines (the "G4" chip is part of the PPC family of processors), then you should be able to just put the Live CD in the drive, reboot and hold down the "C" key to boot from CD.

On the other hand, if your Ubuntu Live CD is for x86 (Intel and compatible) processors, or any other processor family than PPC, then there's nothing that you can do to boot your Power Mac G4 with it. You'll need to get an Ubuntu Live CD for PPC first.

Trevor

Thanks Man. I downloaded it. But now here's the problem. I have tried about every way I seen to boot to Ubuntu for PPC. Including the command prompts to either boot "live", "live-powerpc", live-nosplash-powerpc" and other variations. It starts to load up but then the screen goes black and thats it! Any other advice. I'm familiar with Linux, but its mac thats giving me a hard time lately!

Are you trying to boot to the Live CD? Or have you installed Ubuntu PPC on the hard drive? I've actually never tried an Ubuntu Live CD, but the Kubuntu Live CD that I've tried on my Power Mac worked very easily--as far as I remember, I just held down the C key to boot from CD.

Also remember that we have not ruled out the possibility that your computer has hardware problems that are blocking the booting to Linux.

Trevor

That's true. We haven't. I'm not sure what it is. It loads but I guess it completely fails. But maybe Kubuntu and I think it'll work. At least I hope so. I'll give that a shot. If not, oh well. At least I have the Mac going.

Alright Guys, I have another problem. I used those restore and install discs to install mac os x right? Ok now I have older software which need Mac OS classic or OS 9. I downloaded OS 9. problem is, how do I burn that .toast file to a cd compatible with mac? In fact, I can't even burn it! What can I use on my Windows XP to burn that into either an Iso image or burn it the way it is.

It sounds like the OS 9 that you downloaded is a pirated copy, since it's using a .toast extension. Sorry, we can't help you with pirated copies of OS 9.

However, there's some chance that you can download a legitimate copy of OS 9 directly from Apple.

Trevor