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voyageur · May 25, 2004, 10:48 AM

I just erased and reinstalled 10.2 on a G3 snow iBook for someone. I've done this many times before. The catch was this iBook was purchased in France, and has the French keyboard layout, etc. The user wanted the English version of 10.2 installed this time because she's back in the US. The installation went fine, but instead of the usual "Welcome" screen and music coming up at the end, a message came up saying the Setup Assistant was incompatible with the display resolution and could not run.
Instead, it automatically created a user called "administrator" with an unknown password. This I can reset. The worst problem is the display has been shrunk to a tiny box covering only about half the screen. The Display pane of the SysPrefs has one choice: 1024 x 768, so I can't reset it here. I tried resetting the PRAM and the NVRAM with no luck.

Are French iBooks and their video cards somehow incompatible with OS X install disks from the US? What to do?

:XI: · May 25, 2004, 11:09 AM

Can't you just install from the french disks then select english as the default language? I know my UK English disks will allow me to install in french, german, spanish and pretty much every language OSX supports. I have no idea on fixing the display, sorry :/

Spheric Harlot · May 25, 2004, 11:16 AM

does the machine have the same screen problem when you boot it off an external firewire drive (or another Mac in Target Disk Mode hooked up to the iBook)?

voyageur · May 25, 2004, 01:39 PM

Yes, installing from the original disks would have been the thing to do, I think, but she didn't have those with her.

I tried booting in FireWire Target mode from my computer which was running 10.2.8, as Spheric suggested, and the display looked fine...so this made me think there was just an incompatibility between the French iBook's video and 10.2.0. So I upgraded the iBook to 10.2.6 and the problem disappeared! Thanks for the helpful suggestions.

MartiNZ · May 25, 2004, 03:07 PM

I think this was just to do with 10.2.0 and the newer iBooks, French or otherwise

. I had the same thing happen on my iBook G3 800MHz, which came with 10.2.1 installed, but I decided at some point to make use of the fact that I had bought Jaguar only a few months earlier for my previous iBook ... and ended up with the tiny box that you describe. What was weird was how much stuff it managed to fit in the tiny box (I think it was 640*480 in size, but seemed to fit much more).

Anyway, simply reinstalling again with the 10.2.1 discs that came with the machine did the trick. It's probably not surprising given that macs aren't usually made to run older systems than what they ship with (Classic company excepted), but that seemed quite extreme, not accepting a minor point point below!

tooki · May 25, 2004, 10:18 PM

There are no hardware differences between French iBooks and others (even the KB layout is a software thing, and the paint on the keys), and there's no difference between French Mac OS X and any other -- in fact, unless you explicitly prevent it, OS X is automatically installed in all available languages (in fact, individual users can each choose the language they want).

What it looks like to me is that you managed to install an incompatible version of Mac OS X, which is why the update fixed it.

tooki

voyageur · May 26, 2004, 11:05 AM

Originally posted by tooki:
There are no hardware differences between French iBooks and others (even the KB layout is a software thing, and the paint on the keys), and there's no difference between French Mac OS X and any other -- in fact, unless you explicitly prevent it, OS X is automatically installed in all available languages (in fact, individual users can each choose the language they want).

What it looks like to me is that you managed to install an incompatible version of Mac OS X, which is why the update fixed it.

tooki

Hmm, possibly, but I don't think so; the install was very routine and I've done it the same way from these same disks on different machines many times. I even did the install a second time, just in case. Both times, a full erase and install gave the same weird result. My experience is similiar to MartiNZ's, above. Anyway, it's fixed now, and thanks for the input.

tooki · May 26, 2004, 11:47 PM

As I and someone else said: you probably installed a version that isn't quite compatible (that is, compatible enough to boot, but lacking necessary drivers). That is why the update fixed it.

tooki

voyageur · May 27, 2004, 06:54 AM

Originally posted by tooki:
As I and someone else said: you probably installed a version that isn't quite compatible (that is, compatible enough to boot, but lacking necessary drivers). That is why the update fixed it.

tooki

Ah, sorry Tooki! I misread "incompatible" as "incomplete" in your post the first time round. Yes, that makes complete sense. The funny thing is I searched all over Apple's support pages, and could find no mention of the incompatibility.