PLEASE HELP! Fatal Card Reader Error?!?!?!

W

whoriental

Registered
Ok, I may be out of line here. My girlfriend got a free G4 from work. Its the 450mhz one. Anyway, I was just going to wipe the drive clean but whenever I boot up with the OSX 10.4 or not, it will get to "waiting for network initialization", the it give the erro "Fatal Card Reader Error"


Anyone that knows anything about this, or could point me in the right direction I would be appreciative. Thanks in advance.
 
Sounds like you're not booting from the 10.4 Disc.

With the 10.4 disc in the machine, boot while holding the C key down until you get the Installer screen.

If it boots this way okay, go up to the Utility Menu to Disk Utility to reformat the drive.

You'll have to choose your Language to get to that point.

And, is it a retail copy of Tiger (10.4), or is the disk from another machine?
 
Its the retail version

I am pressing C down, but it never gets to the installer screen. It does the same thing no matter what I do. I tried to look on the Apple web site for that error but found nothing, I have done numorous google searches and cannot find a thing on the error.

I don't know if "card" means RAM, or PCI card, or the card reader that it may or may not have been hooked up too.

I am going to get a new hard drive for it, but there is no way I can just stick the hard drive in there unforrmatted and boot up with OSX can I?

Please please please help. Thanks.
 
You have to format the drive first.

The model of the G4, you have requires a Firmware Update before installing OS X.

To do this, you would have to install OS 9 to install the Firmware Update.

Firmware Page
 
It already has OSX on it, I just want to reformat the drive and start from scratch.

I just need to get past this error. Any info you can find on this would be helpful.
 
whenever I boot up with the OSX 10.4 or not, it will get to "waiting for network initialization
Click to expand...

This makes me think the 10.4 disc isn't being read by the CD/DVD drive.
If the drive in this machine isn't a DVD drive, you can't use the Tiger DVD to install.

Some of these machines only came with CD drives.
 
Ok, she borrowed one of the god forsaken card readers from work. Now is there any way to get around a admin password thing. They un and password that her boss gave her is wrong, and it won't stop loading up with the stupid software that needs to have the card reader thing so it won't recognize the c command and the t command.

I can get to the desktop sucessfully, using on of her convenience cards, but when i click on the icon for the OSX 10.4, it says "would you like to restart in installation mode" or something to that nature, and I say yes then asks me for my username and pass.

Please help. I really want to get this music server thing on the road.
 
Ok so I figured it out.

They put Open Firmware Password Protection on the computer, which blocks you from doing any of the start up commands. I found out from a guy at the apple store (even though, if you offically call apple tech support, they do not support the program, and will not help. Its on their website) if you reset the pram three times, then it will drop the Open Firmware and then you can proceed with the OSX dvd.

Then I used the password reset utility to reset the admin pass, then formatted and so on.

Thank you for all your help though!
 
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