Here's the latest update:

I restarted everything. As I was closing the machine up, I hit the reset button again and rebooted.

I told it to install on the 6Gb HD, erase and install, leave out the foreign language stuff, and continue. It did everything pretty well, installed the "Base System", counting down to 24 minutes left, started installing the "Essential System Software" till it got to 9 minutes. The screen froze, mouse stopped responding, and one minute later, the monitor went to sleep.

So, here we are.

Ideaz??

Plenty of RAM, 768M. Try installing 8.6 again, let's see if it can still do that.

You might try 10.2 one more time, but this time go to the menu after the Language choice and look for Disk Utility, see if you can successfully format the disk from there. Make it Mac OS Extended, it may say HFS+, and if they have a choice for Journaled use that. You'll see a disk with some manufacturer name/#, with the name of your hard drive to the right and down one step. Choose the one with the manufacturers name/# to erase, also choose a name for your disk on the right before you erase, it defaults to untitled when you erase it.

10.2 not installing could even be a bad RAM chip. OS X is less tolerant of marginal RAM. What ran in 8 or 9 may not in X. You could try it with one 256M RAM chip at a time. It will install and run with 256, but much slower than with 768.

Sure would like to try that battery out though. They are around $15 at Radio Shack, a bit of change to spend if that's not the problem, but ebay has one for $5.98 shipped.

I'm surprised the iMac doesn't need one too. If you turn it off and unplug it for a while, or over night, does the time reset?

Installing 8.6 as we speak. Seems to be doing well.

The iMac bettery holds good time. It took several days to ship to me and a day or two before I could find a USB mouse to hook to it, but the time was still correct.

What is the max mem this G3 Minitower will hold? I have several sticks of 500Mb PC 100 memory from my PCs

I don't know if the manual erase before installing thing I posted above would matter, probably not, but it won't hurt to to try, I'm leaning more toward bad RAM, or even a bad installer CD.

Edit - Are the CD's clean and not badly scratched?

You're at the maximum RAM BTW.

Well, it took 8.6 without a hitch. Nothing on here, though, can't connect to the internet (LAN is in place, just not set up on the machine.)

Set TCP/IP in Control Panels to Ethernet DHCP? Restart with the LAN cable plugged in, some models were funny like that, they needed to see a live line at start up to activate the port.

Just wonering--is a 6 GB drive large enough to install 10.2? Reboot?

If you don't install languages, printers, cups, if it had a choice, or X11, if X11 was on 10.2, I forget. There would be plenty of room, so to speak. Slimmed down 10.2 would probably only take about 2G I'm thinking. Full blown it was maybe around 4 or 5?

How much does the installer say it's going to install papabill? Did you uncheck printer installers too? You can install those manually later if you need to.

With everything unchecked (languages, etc) it was only asking for 1.9Gb

There is nothing in the control panels except AppleTalk and Startup Disk