[Lateralus]

Howdy,

I've been trying to do a reinstallation of OS X since yesterday but am unable to boot from any install disc. At first, I thought my newly installed 7447A processor upgrade and it's firmware patch were the culprits. So I threw back in my original processor and uninstalled the firmware update, no dice.

Then I reinstalled my trusty old LiteON 16x DVD-ROM in place of my newly installed NEC 16x DVD burner, since I know the LiteON to be bootable with 9, X and Linux. No dice either.

I can select the OS X disc as the startup device while booted in Panther in the Startup Disk control panel, but upon rebooting the system just hops on the installed version of X on my drive. I can manually start the installation from the CD while in Panther and have the machine reboot that way, same story. Holding down the option key at startup only presents me with the option to boot from my hard drive.

I've zapped my PRAM, reset my NVRAM and pulled every piece of excess hardware in my system. I've even tried running with my Serial-ATA hard drives and PCI card unplugged to see if the system would finally catch on the OS X disc and boot from it. Nada.

I've switched my DVD drive from the onboard ATA-33 to the onboard ATA-66 controller. Nothing.

I'm running out of idears here and my OS X install is on it's last leg after being Carbon Copy Cloned from machine to machine over the past year.

Any idears?

[reader50]

You are not listing what your original machine speed was, the OSX version of your install CDs, or the original video card. Since your install CDs were intended for that platform, the info is relevant.

I'd suspect the video card. Assuming your machine came out well before the Radeon 9800, the install CDs will not have drivers for it, while the existing hard drive install does.

Try running the installers manually and install to a spare partition. Then apply updates as needed - including the 9800 drivers. You don't usually have to boot into a fresh install before applying updates. After the updates are applied, boot from the spare partition. You did format with at least one emergency partition so you could do tricks like this, right? A spare HD will work just as well.

Alternatively, copy & modify your install CDs. Copy into a disk image, add the updated Radeon kexts to /System/Library/Extensions/ and burn as bootable. You might need Toast for this, I'm not sure if Disk Utility can do bootable CDs.

[ginoledesma]

Have you tried booting with Command-Shift-Option-Delete on startup? That should get it to bypass the internal drive for boot-up. If that still doesn't work, I'm guessing you could try using Open Firmware to force boot off a CD. I forget the exact parameters, but it's something to the effect of boot cd:,\\:tbxi