| Strange Blue & White G3 issues with booting 10.4 Install or 10.3.9. [message #287483] |
Thu, 09 April 2015 22:56  |
Scott Holder
Messages: 32
Registered: August 2012
Karma:
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Hey folks,
Recently picked up a free Blue & White G3, which for whatever reason
came with an IX Twin Turbo instead of the ATI card it should have come
with. It wasn't too big a deal, got Mac OS 9 installed and running just
fine, but never could get OS X running as apparently it really, really
doesn't like the IXTT. This part wasn't a big surprise.
Successfully got a GeForce FX 5200 flashed to Mac, and it works fine in
OS 9 (inasmuch as they do, which seems to involve issues changing
resolution, but that isn't important right now) but so far I've had zero
luck getting Tiger working. I've had no luck getting a 10.4 install disc
to boot at all. I first swapped in an IDE DVD drive and tried with my
original rather old DVD. I get the gray screen with the apple logo, and
after the spinny bit spins for awhile I get a blank black rectangle in
the middle of the screen. I obtained a CD version set of install discs
and swapped the original CD drive back in, and got the same result.
Swapped another DVD drive in, and tried a different Tiger DVD and got
the same result yet again. Just for completeness sake I also tried a
random IDE CD-ROM drive I had lying around, with the same results. Also
tried a couple different IDE cables. I've also tried with XPostFacto
even though it shouldn't be necessary, and all I've managed to get from
it is the gray screen with with the white slashed circle error. I even
tried using the successfully installed 10.3 as mentioned below to backup
the 10.4 install DVD to a spare hard drive, and the same boot failure
happens. I even tried a SCSI CDROM with the SCSI card that came with it,
same issue.
Somewhat out of desperation, I dug up a copy of 10.3, and it installed
and ran just fine. GeForce works perfectly with resolution changes, in
general it was fine. I updated to 10.3.9, and now it kernel panics on
boot. I've repeated this a couple or three times and have gotten the
same result.
Few more details about the computer: It started out as a Rev. 2 mobo
350mhz, I've upgraded it to a 500mhz G4 successfully by updating the
firmware and using the G4 Enabler. Since having the issues above, I've
returned it to stock and disabled the G4 Enabler just in case it was
having problems with the G4. No change, same issue. This should rule out
outdated firmware as a cause though, plus this same G4 was working fine
with 10.4 in a Beige G3 previously.
Hard drive configuration doesn't seem to make any difference - I've
tried booting the 10.4 discs with nothing else plugged in other than the
optical drive, and I've tried all the optical drives on both IDE
channels.
PRAM battery tests good, and from some googlings about it sounds like
the PRAM battery shouldn't be impacting this at the stages I've gotten
to. On the off chance it is something related, I've tried every variety
of pram zap, open firmware nvram reset, cuda button pushing and holding,
etc I can find.
I've tried several combinations of RAM, using both the original RAM it
came with (which I believe was 128mb) and the PC133 256mb sticks I've
been using to upgrade it to 768mb. These same sticks work fine in my
Beige G3, even with 10.4.x, so I'm reasonably sure they work fine. I've
done various things in OS 9 to try to use and stress the RAM, and I've
had no trouble with it running fine for days/couple weeks at a time as
well.
The crash details on verbose boot vary. 10.4 gives no real great
indication of what's gone wrong. The only things I see that look like an
error is "localhost lookupd[38]: Can't load
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/NetInfo.framework/Resource s/lookupd/Agents/DS.bundle/DS "
followed by some messages about "optimization changed from TIME to
SPACE" back and forth. I did also see a message flash by that mentioned
something about "hdik: IOLit timed out waiting for driver to load".
Seems to have something to do with HD images? I'm pretty sure I've seen
all these messages come across my working 10.4 on the Beige G3, but I
could be wrong.
10.3.9 on the other hand throws an error: "/etc/rc: line 286: 135 Hangup
SystemStarter -gr ${VerboseFlag} ${SafeBoot}". I've done a lot of the
typical troubleshooting things, disk scans, permissions repairs, etc
with no change. Single User mode boots fine, but neither Safe Mode nor
normal loads. And Single User mode isn't much fun.
Not sure if these two things are related or not, but it's just weird
that this system is having problems with both things it's supposed to
support. I even tried LeopardAssist for funsies despite lots of reports
of issues, and not surprisingly it wouldn't boot the installer either
even with the G4 in. About the only thing I haven't tried is the old
trick of installing it on the Beige G3 and moving the drive over; I
wasn't sure if that was a good idea or not due to its unsupported nature
and hacks necessary to get 10.4 working. Sadly, I have no other Macs
capable of booting 10.4 natively, and since I don't have any other
working video cards I can't verify if the video card might be causing
problems somehow. I've also successfully booted the MintPPC Linux
installer, and operated it fine up to the point of actually installing
it, so again I'm reasonably confident the machine itself is working
fine. I just don't really need yet another Linux box here, but a Mac OS
X 10.4 box would be novel.
At a loss at this point, unless there's just something wrong with the
logic board or some other issue. Anybody got anything else I can try?
I'd really love to get 10.4 going on this for tenfourfox and other
modern conveniences.
Thanks!
Scott
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