[Mellors]

First up, I'm getting a little agitated at present so you'll have to bear with me and I apologize if I'm getting too wordy.

Secondly, the problem. I've got a Gigabit ethernet G4 Powermac. Low end, single processor, 20gb hard drive. I've been having problems ever since I decided to upgrade from OS 9 to X (as far as I'm aware I did everything correctly, updated necessary firmware etc etc). Anyway, I had to reinstall several times as it seemed to keep having problems booting (it would boot to a black screen with white text.) To cut the middle bit out, in the end I began to suspect that the HDD was failing as whenever the problem resurfaced, disk utility always showed lots of disk errors.

Today at last I got hold of a new HDD. I am fairly certain it is compatible (a 120gb PATA drive), followed apple tutorials to replace the hard drive and set it as master. The problem now is getting it to work. I tried to install MacOSX but couldn't and for whatever reason, I simply cannot boot from the disk (using both the C method and the option key method on startup). Whenever I attempted it, it took me to the Open Firmware screen giving me the options to shut down or boot. Booting just takes me to a gray background with the little finder/? file (which I thought meant it can't find a system file on the volume).

I decided to initialize the disk first by target disk mode and disk utility on another mac. This worked but it still refuses to recognise the Tiger DVD. So in the end I decided to use carbon copy cloner to copy what I thought would be a bootable image of MacOSX from my laptop straight onto the new HDD which i would at least allow me to get on so that I could then use the DVD to reinstall a clean copy. I've now done that and used the option key thing on startup to select the volume but it still won't boot from it or the Tiger DVD. All it does is take me to the open firmware screen with the mac-boot option or shut down option. Again mac-boot leads me to the finder/? folder icon. Can anyone please help me? You may have gathered I'm not too hot when it comes to this.

Any help is appreciated and thanks in advance.

[reader50]

Your OSX Install DVD. Is this a retail Tiger DVD, or is it the install disk that came bundled with a different Mac model?

While in OS9, are you able to play DVD movies? This model is old enough now that the optical drive may be failing.

[Mellors]

Thanks for your reply. The copy of Tiger is a legitimate retail copy I picked up specifically for this mac. as for the optical drive, I did worry that maybe it was failing or perhaps I'd messed up (I think it was one of the things I had to update the firmware for when I did the first OSX upgrade). It has worked quite recently though.

I think I may have found the problem which is some bad memory. I could've sworn I'd checked each strip when the first install started playing up but I've just taken out all but one 512 strip which is the newest and it's now booting up perfectly and allowing me to put a clean install on.

[wubrew]

Since you have two mac and had successfully put one as the Target Disk, try clean install while you are in TD mode on another mac.