G4 won't boot Panther CD.

S

spkrman

Registered
I am an experienced Mac tech, but I am stumped on this one. I have a G4 sawtooth 400mhz, which I am trying to install 10.3.2 on. These are gray Emac CD's which I have used with sawtooth's before, bought from OWC. They work fine on another machine. When I boot to this CD (using the option key/startup manager) it boots but stops at the gray screen with spinning pinwheel (the gray one, not rainbow). I held command-V to view verbose messages, and it tries to boot, but stops as soon as it begins to load the blue window. Drops back to black and white verbose screen with a message of 'IOHIDsystem doKickEvent Consumer' and some numbers. System appears to want to boot, but installer quits before it loads. System works fine with 10.1.5 and 9.2.2, which are installed. Those CD's also have no problem booting, (I installed 10.1.5 as a test). Firmware is up to date, 4.2.8f1. I reset NVRAM and reset -all, as I found on several posts, no help.
Any ideas? I have already tried different RAM, unplugging hard drive, switching IDE channels, different CD drive and IDE cable, even 2 video cards. Any Open firmware setting which could be blocking 10.3.2? Help?
 
Those gray discs only work with the specific Macs that they shipped with. It might work here and there with some systems but it's not a guaranteed thing. You need the actual Mac OS X install discs (which have a black background) in order to install OS X on any Mac. You might want to see about returning the discs and purchasing the actual retail install discs.
 
These discs have worked on dozens of machines, from G3's G4's, imac's, even old 7500 with XPostFacto. I don't believe that is the problem, as they won't even boot fully. I have had machine-specific discs that would not install, but you could still boot the system from them.
 
Get a retail version of Panther and see if it will boot from that disc, then you'll know if it's the disc.
 
I think it must be a faulty motherboard or some hardware problem. If I install Panther on the hard drive using a different machine (same type), and install the drive in this one, it boots to Darwin/BSD login prompt, but won't boot the Mac OS. I'm out of ideas.
 
No matter how you slice it, those gray discs are the problem at this point. They might work on some installs, but that doesn't guarantee it will work for all of them (there have been many revisions of the Power Mac G4). Those discs are meant ONLY for the systems they shipped with. If you can get your hands on a retail installation, that would solve the mystery. If it works, then you know that it was those OEM discs. If not, then you can look at hardware as being the problem.

Other ways to test the hardware are by using the Apple Hardware Test discs, downloading SystemRescueCD for the PowerPC architecture, or downloading a Linux/ppc distro and installing that. These are the best options to test the hardware if you don't have the funds for a retail install disc. But at this point my suspicions lie on the grey discs.

I understand that you're an "experienced Mac tech," but most people here that have had years of experience with the Mac already know this, and they've been telling you what the problem is.
 
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