I got a real cool one here!! I actually got two blue iMac G3 units – one a 450MHz, and later a 600MHz. The iMac G3 – a computer like no other!!
The first one had very brittle casing which was crumbling in my hands, and absolutely blown (dry-rotted) speakers, but otherwise seemed to work fine. It’d boot up and operate normally.
The second had no sound at all – funny, because its speakers were actually perfectly fine. This turned out to be an issue with the wiring harness within the CRT (upper) side of the unit! Pain in the butt.
The best resolution turned out to be this: completely tear down the 450 to the very monitor tube itself, then put the whole plastic frame of the 600 around it, as well as its motherboard (with the faster CPU). Presto – sound! Neither casing was perfect, but at least the 600 could be handled without crumbling!
OS install
At this point, the main problem was getting a fresh OS on there. Though I’ve got two good drives here, I want to install a fresh copy of Mac OS X 10.4.11 Tiger – the last version that can run on the IBM PowerPC architecture that these G-series iMacs use. That means having a working disc drive.
Unfortunately, both of my disc drives are a pain to use! A common problem on these slot-loaders is that the belt dries up, and then proper torque from the motor can’t be delivered to the rollers that pull in & push out the disc. This video details a fix, but one thing that tripped me up here is that this guy recommends sticking a metal wire from a twist tie inside the rollers. I don’t recommend this!! It just made my issues worse, since the rollers would get torn up, and now there’s two big problems.
This frustrated me, and I let the system sit aside for a few months, so I could focus on life & other things going on.
Today – on August 15th, 2025 – I found that it sufficed to simply grab a new belt (I have a collection of them…here’s why) and put that across the long path that drives the rollers. I then had to take good rollers from the other drive. And presto, it works!!
One hard drive SMART test later to ensure the 20-something-year-old hard drive is OK… and then a length OSX install… and then tada! Working iMac G3!
Specifications:
- Model: iMac G3/600 SE Early-2001 – M5521 EMC 1857 (M7680LL/A)
- CPU: IBM PowerPC G3 600 MHz
- RAM: 256MB SDRAM
- GPU: ATi Rage 128 Ultra AGP 2X
- HDD: Seagate U Series 5 40GB IDE (ST340823A)
- Optical: Originally CD-RW, upgraded to DVD
