G4 not starting up under 10.4x

P

Phillips

Registered
I recently got a G4 450 AGP. My intension was to take the hard drive out of my B&W G3 which at the time it was installed with 10.3x (all latest updates)
Took out the hard drive and put it in the G4. Started up the computer and was a little slow starting up but it did. I got a dvd ram drive some time ago and put it in and went to update to 10.4.6 with a retail disk. Went and did the update install and when it went to start up in hung up on the gray apple screen with the gray spinning beach ball of death.
Thinking that something went wrong I went thru and did it again.
Same out come. Un hooked the dvd drive and the zipdrive.
No difference.
Switched around the ram chips - used some didn't use others-back and forth.
No difference.
Put in the install dvd and ran apple repair-nothing wrong.
Ran repair permissions and there were things wrong- don't recall what but everything was fixed.
Ran repair permissions again and was clean.
Tried restart same thing.
Ran Disk Warrior-nothing wrong.
Tried running fsck but could not get to run all the way thru.
I figured it was some miss matched ram so I ordered 4 new 256's for this computer.
In the mean time I took out the hard drive and put it back into the B&W and it starts right up.
Did all the updates to 10.4.11 and have been running it in there till the ram chips came today.
Put in the new ram chips and took an old norton's cd to boot off of set the start up disk to 9.2.2 (which is in a partion by itself) ran the G4 firmware updater and it said that the firmware was all up to date.
Set the start update disk to the 10.4.11 and restarted.
Same result-- gray screen and spinning ball.
Un hooked the dvd-ram drive and the zip drive. Restart
Same out come.
Turned it off and started under single user mode.
Tried to run fsck again.
Here is all I got way back when and the same thing now.
**/dev/rdisk0s10
**Root file system
**Checking HFS Plus volume
**Checking Extents Overflow file
**Checking Catalog file


And there it sits and goes no further.
It has been sitting there for 45 minutes and nothing.

It has an Apple SCSI card in it which I also took out to make sure there was nothing hooked up expect the ATI rage pro video card(factory) and the usb key board and usb mouse pluged into the key board.
As far as I can tell everything works right under 9.2.2 but will not start up installed in the G4 with 10.4.11 but will in the B&W
I'm sure there is something that I didn't try but can't think of it.
Thanks
Bruce
 
On the G4 while the hard drive was in it the pram was also zapped (three dongs) also reset the PMU no difference.
 
Have you tried a fresh install of Mac OS X on the G4, or are you still trying to boot with OS X that was originally installed on your G3, then moved to the G4?

Also, you've posted similar questions over and over... it's best to continue to troubleshoot your problem in the original thread you posted instead of starting new threads over and over.

http://macosx.com/forums/search.php?searchid=1703973
 
These old machines could run OSX just fine, BUT you had to made sure you had all the available firmware updates applied. And here's the issue: some of these had to be applied in OS9.x before you could successfully install and boot OSX on that hardware – what hard drive you have in there is irrelevant until this is done. I'm guessing that is your issue.
 
EL,
I didn't post it here it was put here by the tech's and I was told not to get off subject but to start a new thread.
Not a firmware problem as I stated the firmware is up to date (it was done before anything else was done) Please read first posting.
I took a new clean hardrive and did a clean install of the 10.4.6(retail disc) in the G4 and got the same place.
My original thought as it is a hardware problem but maybe the tech's had some other ideas I could try.
So any thing else for suggestions?
 
Hmmm... they seem to do that a lot. I'm starting to think that they should check to see whether a thread exists already before placing a tech support ticket into the forums... but then again, that's not my decision to make.

Is all the RAM in the computer factory-supplied RAM, or is there some 3rd-party stuff in there? My only suggestion at this point would be to try and return the machine to an "as stock as possible" configuration, then try to install OS X again.
 
New ram from DMS which is model specific. Everything that was not needed to install was disconnected or taken out when the last clean install was tried. Will try again when time permits.
 
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