[WOPR]

My free Lombard isn't as cool as I thought it was. I fitted a new hard drive and then installed 10.3, all was fine. Half way through the 'optimisation' stage of the 10.3.9 update it locked up and I had to restart. This gave me the no entry sign and I had to reinstall everything from scratch.

All seemed fine until last night when I left it downloading some files when I went to bed. This was at 11.25. Next morning the screen is showing 11.29 on the clock, the cursor has disappeared and there's nothing I can do but push the restart button on the back. Guess what? No entry sign again!

Arghh!!

Single user mode isn't an option as the sign comes up straight after the Apple logo. So I'm installing 10.3 on it AGAIN. Any ideas? All seemed fine inside when I fitted the hard drive so I'm baffled. I've used OS X since the beta and I've not seen this no entry sign before so it's a learning curve for me

[firefly]

Have you:

-Reset the PMU (Power Management)/Zapped PRAM,
-Checked for dodgy RAM (tried with different modules),
-Scanned the HD for bad sectors with a boot CD like Norton?

[WOPR]

Tried all those. I've just installed 9.2.2 which works fine, and now Panther boots again. I'll see how it goes today but something isn't right somewhere along the line.

[Eriamjh]

Check the HD's SMART status. It might be failing.

[WOPR]

HDD is fine and is only 6 months old. It is now stable anyway, when I reinstalled Panther I also installed OS9 as a backup OS and since then it's worked perfectly in Panther. Very odd indeed.