[The Rod]

I have an Ibook G4. It came with 10.3 and I had no problem loading 10.4. Now after a bit I decided to add a new hard drive. When trying to boot from the cd it wont. It gives me the ? folder and thats it. If I press option it turns to a lock with a password. Ive tried several drives and even different os disks. Nothing seems to work. I went to an apple store and no one could figure it out. Theres got to be a simple explanation. Please help!!!

[rjenkinson]

did you set up a password for open firmware?

-r.

[The Rod]

I dont know what that is. I bought it off ebay a while ago and I guess it was already on there. I read earlier about trying to bypass somehing by pressing option and S but it doesnt do anything.

[chipchen]

yea... sounds like open firmware was locked with a password. better try to contact the previous owner.

[The Rod]

I cant contact the previous owner and it wont accept any commands. Ive tried removing memory, using various commands and nothing. If someone knows how to get around this Ill greatly appreciate it.

[bluedog]

Wow, that's a new one. Firmware password should be able to be bypassed by changing the RAM and any Apple "Genius" should have been able to do this.

Do you have access to an external CD/DVD drive? Or perhaps another mac of the same architecture? I've successfully reinstalled by connecting the laptop to another computer via firewire using target-disc-mode.

To do this, from a reset hold down the T key during the boot process. You should get a bluescreen with a firewire logo that moves around a bit like a screensaver (and the screen has a battery guage).

Then plug the firewire cable into the laptop and the desktop. Your laptop appears like an external drive to the desktop. You can insert the DVD or CD installer into the desktop, during the install ask to install on the 'removable drive' which happens to be your laptop.

Once installed on that drive, you can shutdown and boot the laptop with the new OS. The caveat is to be sure its the same architecture. OSX installs the proper binaries for the OS (which isn't all written as a universal binary for core components of the OS) based on the architecture it detects during installation.

Its not just the Intel-IBM differences, you can't install from a G5 to a G4 and expect it to work either. Good luck!

[rjenkinson]

check the section on disabling password protection on this page.

-r.