[shifuimam]

This iBook is driving me up a fricking wall. It's a 300MHz tangerine, Rev. A with 32MB onboard RAM and a 3GB hard drive.

I can't boot off of anything but the hard drive for the life of me. I've tried the OS 8.6 discs that came with the iBook. It gets halfway through loading the OS and just shuts off. I've tried the retail copy of OS X 10.3 that I have, via Option+boot. I click the icon for the CD-ROM (which says "Mac OS X Install Disc 1"), hit the arrow button, and the screen flashes and stays on the boot device selection screen. I tried the PowerPC versions of Ubuntu 5.10 and 6.04, both of which almost immediately throw the following error:

[codex]Claim failed for initrd memory
ramdisk load failed![/codex]

And then put me into Open Firmware.

Anyone seen anything like this before? Is the CD-ROM dead? It can still see discs and mounts them fine when I'm booted into OS 9.2 (which is what's installed on the thing), but why in the world can I not boot off of ANYTHING?

[ghostdawg]

Have you tried booting a linux livecd? May not have enough memory...Just a thought.

[seanc]

The RAM may be faulty. Is the 32mb RAM soldered onto the logic board?

[shifuimam]

I added a 256MB stick of RAM, and was then able to boot off the Panther CD and install OS X.

The 32MB is soldered onto the board, and I have no idea if it's even possible to disable it in OF.

I was able to boot off and old Ubuntu 6.04 CD, but it froze after logging into X11, and sat there for an hour displaying nothing but the default wallpaper and a mouse cursor. The Ubuntu 5.10 CD wouldn't boot at all. I'm going to try downloading the latest Fedora for PPC, so we'll see how that goes.

I still can't boot off the original CDs that came with the thing.

Is there a way to disable the onboard memory, if that is indeed the problem?