[landshrk]

Please, read this. I have already gone through the forum posts, and have not found the answer to my problems. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Okay, so here's what's happened. We have a PowerMac G4 Cube. It's old, slow, and, for the most part, completely unused. It booted up fine, running some older version of OSX (probably 10.1.2, but as it's not my computer, and my girlfriend's kind of an idiot when it comes to computers, my information about what was on it previously is shaky at best).

She decided she wanted to install Leopard. I told her that she should go online, do some research, find out if there are any known issues with trying to install Leopard on such an old machine, etc. She didn't. So, put the Leopard DVD in, booted from the install disc, and the machine totally took a dump.

She got the "You need to restart your computer (in several languages)" screen, overlaid with a message I've never seen. Lots of "backtrace," large blocks of error messages, all ending in "Panic: We are hanging here" (again, as it was her doing this, and not me, I didn't get a chance to write all this down, and she's kinda given up on the whole thing. I'm doing this to see if it's fixable/what will need to be done to fix it). Just FYI, I haven't been much of a Mac user since I got my mother's Dell laptop when she passed, and started running Linux (still UNIX!), and really getting into messing with my computer. All these messages were completely foreign to me, though I got the general gist of it all... the computer is having major issues.

After this happened (BTW, no matter how we try to boot it, still get this same screen), she looked into it online (again, all information that would've been useful YESTERDAY! (sorry, just watched The Wedding Singer last night...)), and found out that the G4 Cube is NOT COMPATIBLE with Leopard, so my thinking is that what we have here is a total RAM failure.

Now that you have been caught up on exactly what's gone down in this situation, my questions are these:

*Is this fixable? She'd like to have this things working again.

*What do I need to do to fix it, if it is fixable?

Again, thank you so much for taking the time to mull this over, and provide an ex-Mac user a little helpful advice. Cheers, and happy Mac-ing!

[reader50]

The Cube should run Leopard, but will probably fail the MHz check done by the Leopard installer. There are ways around this, but a better choice may be to install 10.4 Tiger on it. Question: has this Cube received a CPU upgrade at any point?

In the meantime, I'd suggest pushing the CUDA reset button, only I don't know where that's hidden in a Cube. Then boot without a DVD inserted, so it will go back to the hard drive.

If she managed to get partway into the install process and messed up the OS install on the HD, then you'll need an install DVD or CD to get things going again.

[Leonard]

At the bottom of this Apple article, it seems to indicate where the CUDA (reset) switch is on the motherboard.
Power Mac G4 Cube: Troubleshooting: Power-On Light Self Test

Or if you look at this picture, the location is indicated by S1:

[Leonard]

If I read the post correctly and she's telling you exactly what she did. It sounds like she didn't even install anything. That as soon as she booted from the Leopard DVD, her Cube Kernel Panicked. If that's the case, it should be a matter of just removing the DVD from the drive. To do that all she needs is to boot up the Cube while holding the mouse button down, I believe, and then the Mac should eject the DVD, and start from the HD.

If I've misread things and she is trying to start up from the Cube's internal HD, then it sounds like what Reader said is true, and she's messed up the system on her HD. In which case Reader is right and you need the re-install or system DVD that came with the Cube (or the System disk that was used to install the system she had).

[angelmb]

Originally Posted by reader50 

(…) a better choice may be to install 10.4 Tiger on it.

Seconded. Tiger on my Power Mac G4 MDD is as snappy as Snow Leopard on my Mac Pro.