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genep · Dec 29, 2003, 03:42 PM

I just bought the panther family pack. The first system I tried to upgrade was my imac dv (400Mhz) which is running 9.2.2 and has had the firmware upgrade as recommended.

But the imac won't boot the panther disk !!! I can read the disk and launch the installer which then tries to restart the machine for a cd boot. I verified the os 9 boot disk works fine on this machine.

Does anyone know of a reason the panther disk would be a problem?

Krusty · Dec 29, 2003, 05:33 PM

Originally posted by genep:
IDoes anyone know of a reason the panther disk would be a problem?

I can't speak for Panther, but I had a prob once loading 10.1 onto a 400mhz iMac DV ... seems that OS X was much pickier about the fact that the firewire ports on the DV iMac were burnt out. Still worked fine in 9, though. I assumed that the firewire ports were the problem and then verified by booting into single user mode (which looks like a DOS boot-up) and saw that the reboot did, in fact, hang when trying to address the firewire ports.

*note: hold command + S when booting to invoke single user mode.

genep · Dec 30, 2003, 10:42 AM

Well, it turns out the command-s didn't work ... at all. The system didn't recognize the key sequence and would not boot into single user mode no matter how many times I tried it.

Now the frustrating part!!! When I updated the firmware it turns out I also lost my memory upgrade. Yep, I had bought a 512MB memory upgrade that was 2 wait state that worked fine until the firmware upgrade. Now the memory is not supported by the new firmware so my system is now running with 64MB of physical memory and 900MB of virtual.

So, the boot problem of the os x disk 'might' be due to insufficient memory. I really won't know until I get new 3-wait-state memory.

Does anyone know of a patch/fix/upgrade that will re-enable the 2-wait-memory? This is really frustrating since there really isn't a problem with the memory, just with the firmware.

bradoesch · Dec 30, 2003, 11:58 AM

You might want to read this thread for information on running Panther with 64 MB.

As for the firmware update issues, it's too bad you didn't upgrade earlier. Some people here got their RAM replaced for free. Apple says it's for the best, I don't know any specifics. I'm just glad my cheap RAM was good enough. (It got replaced anyway). Somebody wrote a great little utility that would analyze your RAM to check if was compatible with the newer firmware. Too late for that I guess. :/

genep · Dec 30, 2003, 05:33 PM

I just found that my 'unsupported' memory has a life time guarantee with a replacement policy (thanks chip merchant). After I get it replaced tomorrow I will be trying again.

Unless someone can say otherwise, my guess is the osx cd needs more than 64MB just to boot ... strange really.

bradoesch · Dec 31, 2003, 09:30 AM

Originally posted by genep:

Unless someone can say otherwise, my guess is the osx cd needs more than 64MB just to boot ... strange really.

Not that strange, really. I'm sure Apple says it for a reason.