[Malt Magics]

hey everyone,

I recently tried installing Tiger 10.4 onto my iMac G5 (250 GB HD, 1GB RAM), and it is having issues booting up now.

Let me first add that the copy of Tiger 10.4 is a developers copy. Second, is that it never properly installed in the first place.

I'll explain.

When I inserted the DVD and rebooted, I chose the language settings and went to the initial installation screen. I didn't get past that because the rainbow scroll wheel appeared and I received a prompt telling me an error occurred while installing. I had to either restart, shutdown, or view or save log.

I restarted.

After it rebooted again, I was able perform a clean install, erased everything on the HD and installed the OS successfully. Or so it said. I restarted as I was prompted to.

The restart never got past the blue screen; The gray screen appears, the Apple icon comes up, and then the progress bar processes. Then the blue screen comes up. This is where it gets stuck.

Either the rainbow scroll wheel appears or the spinning time clock. It just sits there looking like it's loading up. Nothing ever happens, so I tried rebooting it several times with the same results.

So I ended up running diskwarrior, and replaced the directory hoping this would help. it did not. same blue screen upon restart.

So, I ran the Apple Hardware Test, performing the extended test, and there was nothing wrong. It took so damn long I went to sleep before it finished, but woke up to see it was fine and shut it down.

Today, after returning from work, I turned it on, and for some reason, it got past the blue screen and had me register the computer again. I completed this and it loaded up the desktop and dock. my Home folder appeared automatically and then the rainbow scroll wheel appeared, allowing me to do nothing. Eventually the finder seemed to crash as the icons disappeared. Rainbow scroll wheel allowed me to do nothing.

I rebooted again and the same thing happened.

I reinstalled Tiger again, which it performed successfully, but only got to the blue screen again.

I then tried to reboot using the original OS installer disks (Panther), but it isn't able to reboot. It only gets to the blue screen and remains idle.]

Now I'm running the bloody hardware test again.

I need help.

any thoughts or advice?

many thanks

[Malt Magics]

by the way, I know the developers copy does indeed work as I installed it on my old G3 iMac Graphite DV successfully.

[jmiddel]

If it does the same thing in Panther, it's a hardware problem. I assume you have two 256MB memory sticks. remove one and try to boot, then if you still have the problem replace and remove the other one. Don't necessarily trust the test disk, it does not always find the problem. Since the problem happens both from the optical drive and the HD it does not seem a disk failure, so if it is not memory it could be a logic board issue.

[Malt Magics]

Originally Posted by jmiddel 

If it does the same thing in Panther, it's a hardware problem. I assume you have two 256MB memory sticks. remove one and try to boot, then if you still have the problem replace and remove the other one. Don't necessarily trust the test disk, it does not always find the problem. Since the problem happens both from the optical drive and the HD it does not seem a disk failure, so if it is not memory it could be a logic board issue.

thanks. not the best diagnosis to hear, but will try that.

[Malt Magics]

it didn't work.

thanks anyhow.