I picked up an old power macintosh 7100/66 at a thrift store. I got the computer to boot successfully once, after that I could only get to the splash screen (Welcome to Mac OS), and after that the HD quit running. I did pick up a software package cheap on ebay that has an install disk for OS 8.5, and I am able to boot from the CD, and the disk utility says the HD checks out okay. When I tried to just go ahead & install the newer OS it says I am unable to install it on this machine. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Pretty sure the older OS's are free at Apple, you can't run any powerpc versions. The documentation also ought to be at apple. Might look at linux or beos for that to try. There might be some old unix versions that might be out there for that too. It is pretty old. Might be better to use mac on stick or do the hackintosh deal. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

1. PLEASE post in the correction section! This is a mac question, and you have out-of-date technicians like me that use to work on these machines everyday for a living hovering around in the mac section waiting for questions like this so we don't have to answer dumb unix(OS X) questions all day long. 2. the correct OS for this machine is going to be 7.5.5, maybe 8.1, but things tend to get a bit slow in 8.1 and up. 8.5 will be a total dog on a 66mhz PPC 601. Why is it not installing? Did you buy a retail copy of 8.5? Or someones install CD that came with their computer? Either way there is a way to trick it to install if it's looking for the correct gasualt ID(machine ID number). For your answers, you WILL NEED to post this in the MAC section. Thanks. PowerMac 9600(1 ghz G4) 512mb RAM 50gb SCSI ATi 9200 PCI