G5 boots only in safe mode

S

shorejaws

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I have a number of macs one being a G5 1.8 x 2 that has been running 10.3.9 for quite some time with no problems whatsoever. Decided to upgrade to keep in line with other macs but first just to 10.4. Machine only boots in safe boot mode. If regular boot, get message that I need to restart. Restart message reappears and often fans race. May have kernell panic but did hardware test, disk first aid and all hardware checks out fine.
Finally downgraded back to 10.3 and machine works fine. Did total clean install with 10.4 again and same results. Is there a firmware I need to upgrade, I can't find one. Please help. I have been working with macs exclusively since 1989 (never user a "PC") but I'm perplexed.
 
I might recommend making the jump all the way to 10.5.8. I have a G5 as well and it is running 10.5.8 perfectly.... Even better than when I had 10.4 on it.

Good Luck!
 
How much RAM is in the machine? After the install of 10.4 the machine should have at least restarted once if it finished installing. Did 10.4 successfully install or did it error out? Is the 10.4 disk gray machine specific or a black retail version? Have you ever popped the back off of the machine? Might save a lot of trouble to check to see if it has blown/bulging caps on the logic board since many G5 iMacs were/are having issues like that. Perhaps that's why its acting flaky.
 
The machine's a G5 1.8 x 2 tower with 2.5Gb ram that I've had around for a while. Ironically, I got it to boot ok with 10.4 (retail versiion) + upgrades after my post, did a couple of restarts with success and then the dreaded message came up again. I then decided to install a clean erase & install of 10.5 with no success. Lastly, I decided to erase the drive and reinstall with the original machine specific 10.3 disc that came (10.3 worked perfectly before all this began). Now I get a message that there were errors installing the software and to try installing again.
So, after all this, I have a machine that boots fine with the system disc with an empty hard drive with no system software installed on it which won't allow me to install system software.
Any suggestions?
 
G5 tower! Gotcha. Did you try to utilities/run disk utility from the install disk to see if it found any issues or if it will successfully repair the disk. If it does find anything that it can't repair and you are not concerned with recovering data off the drive, you may want to fully zero out the drive just to see it the machine will do it without crashing. Also a good fitness test for the drive.
 
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