Trouble installing FMS 3 on a G5

[Crossett]

I have FMP 3 installed on the same machine and everything works fine. The G5 has OSX 10.4.11 on it as that is the last operating system that will run the classic environment. The installer file for FMserver has a ".mbn" extension, that no application is associated with. Apple says all they can do is reinstall classic. Filemaker doesn't support any version 7 or older. I'm playing around with an emulator called sheep shaver, but I don't have very high hopes for it.

Please tell me one of you guys knows what i'm doing wrong, I dread updating the whole database to a new version (yes, even though this one is 13 years old).

[IdealData]

Theoretically it should run - but as you have found it doesn't, and I don't why either. I used to run FMS 3, but that was on native 9.2.

One day your G5 will die and you won't be able to get another, so you are only delaying the inevitable - it's time to upgrade.

It's not clear how large your system is, whether it is heavily scripted, or how many files are involved. It sounds like a system built by yourself so you will, no doubt, have an idea, which is leading you into your state of dread.

It may be better to re-write from scratch rather than convert as the conversion will not take advantage of the hundreds of new features since FM7, and more particularly with v10. The conversion process may also fail to convert files which are considered damaged, so if you've had any system crashes or similar there's a possibility of that too.

Even if you did convert there are many things to check, which, on balance, might lead to a re-write.

The good news is you can get a free 30 day trial version of FM10, so you could run the conversion and see what you get, otherwise stick another hard drive in the G5 and install 9.2 on it.