I recently purchased four used mac computers. I do own other Macs but these are the first used Macs that I have owned so I have never had to go through some of these things. The first computer is a g4 power mac 400MHZ with dvd and zip. The other two are imac dv slot loading machines. I'm running into install trouble on both machines. Here are the problems I'm having:
( I purchased a tiger 10.4 DVD and cd-set. I have the DVD set but am still waiting on the cd set)
Powermac: the machine came with no hard drive. I went out to the store and bought a seagate 400 gig ATA drive and installed. I power the mac up and I get the folder thats asking where do I boot from( i think). no problem I insert the dvd into the disk drive and it starts to boot the the mac os x installer. It gets to the point where it asked for the language. I select english and click the next arrow. A screen says "preparing installation" comes up but it will not get past this screen. I thought it might be a problem because of how slow this thing is compared to my new mac so I last night I decided to leave it on and come back. I came back hours later and still had the same screen. I then thought it was the dvd drive so I broke out an external dvd drive. Boots up and does the same thing. I restet the PRAM. Next move would be to do the firmware but I don't know how to do it without the operating system.
Imac (running 10.3): I plugged the same dvd drive into the Imacs and boot off the dvd no problem. However the install won't work because it needs the upgraded firmware. No problem. I boot back into 10.3 (keep in mind it allows me to login but I don't have sys admin rights and don't know the password) downlaod the firmware update file and double click. It opens the image but requires 9.x to install. I doble click and classic loads. Looks as though it completes loading but nothing happens. No prompts, etc and classic appears to unload. I thought it was an admin problem so I boot off the dvd and go to utilities to reset the password, however the internal hard disc is not even an option. Sorry for the long thread......Any help would be greatly appreciated.
( I purchased a tiger 10.4 DVD and cd-set. I have the DVD set but am still waiting on the cd set)
Powermac: the machine came with no hard drive. I went out to the store and bought a seagate 400 gig ATA drive and installed. I power the mac up and I get the folder thats asking where do I boot from( i think). no problem I insert the dvd into the disk drive and it starts to boot the the mac os x installer. It gets to the point where it asked for the language. I select english and click the next arrow. A screen says "preparing installation" comes up but it will not get past this screen. I thought it might be a problem because of how slow this thing is compared to my new mac so I last night I decided to leave it on and come back. I came back hours later and still had the same screen. I then thought it was the dvd drive so I broke out an external dvd drive. Boots up and does the same thing. I restet the PRAM. Next move would be to do the firmware but I don't know how to do it without the operating system.
Imac (running 10.3): I plugged the same dvd drive into the Imacs and boot off the dvd no problem. However the install won't work because it needs the upgraded firmware. No problem. I boot back into 10.3 (keep in mind it allows me to login but I don't have sys admin rights and don't know the password) downlaod the firmware update file and double click. It opens the image but requires 9.x to install. I doble click and classic loads. Looks as though it completes loading but nothing happens. No prompts, etc and classic appears to unload. I thought it was an admin problem so I boot off the dvd and go to utilities to reset the password, however the internal hard disc is not even an option. Sorry for the long thread......Any help would be greatly appreciated.