Chosen Solution
I recently obtained an imac g3 (slot loading) from my highschool, as they had no use for it and were going to throw it in the dumpster around the back of rhe school. My friend and i started it up ( at school, as the one condition was we had to wipe the hard drive) and wiped the hard drive. I took it home, plugged it in and turned it on. The happy mac chime sounded and it went to the screen where it shows the apple logo and a loading wheel. I have tried all the ways to fix it ( reset the pram, single user mode commands, verbose mode commands, trying to boot in safe mode and going into the boot options) but to no prevail. I think i will need to buy an os disk and boot it off that but first, is there any other way?
There is usually a plate inside the port door on the side of the machine that will tell you which machine you have. Here are 13 different ones: http://www.everymac.com/ultimate-mac-loo… Select which one you have to see what the original operating system was and just how high it can go. The school may still have the original installations disks. If not, you will be able to find them on eBay.
