Jag won't install on B&W? HELP!

[Ripcord]

Has anyone else experienced massive freezing when trying to install OS X 10.2 on a B&W G3?

I recently bought a 450mhz B&W, and have had no end of trouble with it. Originally it was freezing (and doing weird application crashes) quite often even with OS 9.2.2, but I swapped out the 3 128MB DIMMS that came in it (all 3rd-party, from what I can tell) with an Apple-brand 256MB DIMM, and 9.2.2 is rock-solid now. I haven't been able to find a way to crash it (or cause it to freeze).

I should also clarify what I mean by freeze - EVERYthing stops. Mouse cursor, keyboard activity, system clock (if I was in 9.2.2), the CD/hard drive, the little progress bar animation in the OS X installer).

It also crashes at random points during the install. It tends to freeze right after the "Do you agree to the license agreement" dialog drops down, but only about 20% of the time. The other 80% it freezes just about anywhere during the process (including very rarely during the grey apple logo load screen).

Any thoughts? I feel like I've tried EVERYthing. I've swapped out pretty much all the hardware in the box except the logic board, CPU, and power supply - video card, memory, SCSI card, hard drive (even tried removing the SCSI card and using an IDE disk), CD-ROM. I've even tried disconnecting the modem and the firewire daughterboards.

As far as I know, I have the latest firmware on everything - 1.0 "MacOS ROM", 1.1 Firmware, and 1.2 SCSI Firmware (all the updaters tell me that the firmware levels are current).

I've tried running a reset-all in Open Firmware.

I even tried booting with a hard drive from my DigAudio 533 G4 running 10.2.1. It actually will boot fine 100% of the time - unless it freezes. If it does boot, then it freezes eventually (I don't think I've gotten anything more than 5 minutes out of it. However, they're GOOD 5 minutes - I'm actually surprised how well Jag performs on this box =).

Note - when I boot up off of that hard drive into Single User mode, it works fine, and I can't find a way to make the machine fail.

Since 9.2.2 is so rock-solid, I have trouble believing that this is a hardware problem. I think there's something about my system still that Jag doesn't like (like old firmware or something).

Oh, I had noticed some scratches on my Jag Disk #1, so I burned a fresh copy of it. No errors during the burn, and still the exact same freezes.

Help!! I really don't want to be stuck with OS 9 on this box...

Ian

[neo36]

do you maybe have a release of jag which isn't final? i installed some beta versions on a g4 b/w 350 MhZ, two of three version had only minor problems, but the other one always crashed and stuff.

just a tought...

[Ripcord]

Nope, this one's fully retail...

Ian

[jove]

We had similar problems installing OS X (10.0) on our lime iMac 333 MHz Rev C machine. We tried repairing the hard disk. It had a lot of problems. But that didn't help. Since we had just upgraded the RAM, we suspected bad RAM. Through a lot of RAM swapping (real fun in an iMac) we concluded that it wasn't bad RAM. The iMac had also been freezing in OS 9. I figured that was the natural state of OS 9. I'd never had a Mac (and I've had many) that didn't do a total freeze every once in a while.

So we took it to a Mac repair shop and asked them to somehow install OS X. They did it! They kept swapping out hardware until it worked. The piece they ended up replacing was the processor card. We could have the iMac back with a new processor card for about $400. Aaagh! Well, the lime iMac went to charity (with the old processor card) and I am writing this on a 500 MHz indigo iMac running 10.2.2.

Try taking a good look at your hardware: disk, RAM, processor, etc.

Good Luck