Tiger Install Woes

mrcarson2

Registered
I have a G3 450Mhz 512MB Ram. I upgraded to tiger from 10.3.9 a couple of months ago. Tiger installed perfectly. I was using a Western Digital 20gig drive that I had previously on a windows machine. I pulled my 40gig Western Digital from another windows box and wanted to do a clean install of tiger on that drive only. The installation failed 3/4 of the way through and stated that errors occured and to try installation again. I did several times and it still failed. I used disk utility and formatted repartitioned it and it still failed. Next step I took was to clone the old drive to the new one, it cloned fine, but when I went to boot from the new drive, osx booted a little slow and when at the desktop was completely unstable. Whenever I would open the finder, the dock and application bar would restart. It was completely unusable. I am stumped at this point. Is there some minimum partition size that osx needs to be installed on? I need help!
 
First, make sure what G3 machine you have. OS X is unsupported on many G3 machines. Apple decided to only support G3 machines with in-built USB. That meant that only the B+W G3's and iMacs were supported. So if you have an older G3 without in-built USB - like a beige G3 you are going to find it hard going...

Given that you have a 450Mhz machine and are installing more than one HD I'm assuming that you have a 450Mhz G3 B+W. This machine does have in-built USB so everything should be okay.

There was a minimum partition size requirement on older G3's. It was - you had to install OS X on a 8GB (max) partition located at the start (top) of the drive. And if you didn't you would get severe disk problems. Also, a program called 'XPostFacto' (an installer helper application) was the knight in shining armour to get OS X installed on an unsupported system.

Your situation puzzles me because (assuming you have a supported machine) there really shouldn't be any problems. Check your other hardware for compatiblity.

The only other thing I can think of is your disk arrangement. I doubt that you are connecting the drives via a PCI controller - which means you are using the in-built ATA controller which has support for two drives. However, in that arrangement, one drive needs to be set as the Master and the other as Slave (set via pins on HD). You can (should be able to) only boot an operating system from the drive set as Master. So when both installing and booting OS X you should should set the desired drive to Master. Also bare in mind that the G3/G4 towers generally use a colour coded ATA ribbon, where - Blue is the connection to the motherboard - Gray is the slave, and - Black is the Master. Using the ribbon in other arrangements can cause errors.
 
hmm, that puzzles me because am currently running tiger on the 20g drive and no problems. I assume I have the master/slave settings correct because both drives mount on the desktop. I have tried many other settings and cables, but Tiger will always give me errors on the 40g drive. Maybe I'll try another drive and see if that is the problem.
 
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