[OsakaBill]

My Gigabit ethernet DP PowerMac G4 has been upgraded quite a bit�1.5 GB RAM, Pioneer DVR-105, SIIG USB 2.0 PCI card, ACARD ATA-100/133 PCI card, two 80 GB Maxtor HDD, and an ATi Radeon Pro 9000 AGP card.

ATi recently released an update for Mac owners of ATi Radeon cards running Mac OS X 10.2.8.

After installing the updated Radeon drivers, my PowerMac is DEAD.

First, upon re-boot, I get a good old-fashioned blinking System folder. After a few seconds, the blinking stops and the gray Mac OS X 10.2 logo appears.

Second, Mac OS X 10.2 boot screen displays for about a minute. Then the gray "prohibited" boot screen appears. (FYI, this is a gray "no" symbol�circle with a line through it.) I have never, ever, seen the gray "prohibited" screen before.

I have tried booting in Single User Mode, but I cannot. The "prohibited" screen appears before the PowerMac can enter Single User mode.

I have tried starting the PowerMac in FireWire Target Disk Mode, but while holding down the "T" key, the PowerMac shuts itself off.

I have tried zapping the PRAM (COMMAND+Option+P+R). No dice.

I have gone into Open Firmware and reset the NVRAM. No dice.

I have gone into Open Firmware and entered the command to force the mac to load the drivers in the ROM of the video card. No dice.

I have undone the above. No dice.

The PowerMac will boot into Mac OS 9. I booted into Mac OS 9 and tried running DiskWarrior on the drive. DW made some direcotry repairs which helped a little. When I tried rebooting into Mac OS X, the blinking System folder was gone; however, it still would not boot. Now, after the gray Apple boot screen appears, I think I get a kernel panic (two small black boxes appear above the Apple logo with garbled text).

At the moment, I have booted the PowerMac from a TiBook in FWTDM. This reverse FWTDM works just fine. I am attempting to use my TiBook's OS X 10.2.8 System to repair the permissions on my PowerMac's OS X 10.2.8 drive.

Any ideas what on earht is going on and how to fix it?

[mcsjgs]

You might check the boards at:

http://xlr8yourmac.com/

They have been very active in video problems and the ATI update.

[digital_dreamer]

I thought this ATI update was ONLY for retail cards?



regards,
MAJ

Edit: Oops! I need to attend reading comprehension classes, again! My bad!

So, you've upgraded your gigabit G4 with the ATI 9000. Obviously, not a OEM card.

At least it's ++ post count!

regards,
MAJ

[badidea]

I have a very similar setup and I have also seen the gray "prohibited" boot screen!
But in my case it came up first after I upgraded 10.2.8 to 10.3 - I then found out that it had something to do with the Acard ATA/133 PCI card and I moved 2 (one with OS 10.3) of my 4 HDs from the Acard to the standard ATA/66 internal controller.

Boot problem is gone since then!

(Acard support never replied to my bug report, also Mike from xlr8yourmac.com never posted my bug report, neither did I find anybody else with this problem...)

[jptrenner]

I had the black screen when I ran utilities or word. IE 5.2.3 was crashing upon launch after updating my OSX 10.2.8 with three or four updates.

Solution

Download and install Mac OS X 10.2.8 (Build 6R73), or later. You can get it using the Software Update feature in System Preferences. For more information about using Software Update, see technical document 106704, "Mac OS X: How to Update Your Software".

Mac OS X 10.2.8 (Build 6R73) is known to resolve the issue for PowerBook G3 Series (Bronze Keyboard) computers. If you have a different computer and the issue persists, follow these steps:

1. Open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/).
2. Type:

sudo mv /System/Library/Extensions/AppleNDRV/ATIDriver.bundle /Users/Shared/

Note: There is a space after "mv" and another after ".bundle".

3. Press Return.
4. Type: sudo touch /System/Library/Extensions
5. Press Return.
6. Restart the computer.

If desired, you can remove "ATIDriver.bundle" from the Shared folder, but I didn't and it works great.

In one of the Utility app's ran, it said there was an invalid file type in my "Users System Preferences" and most likely it was "com.apple.internetconfig.plist." I dragged it to the trash, restarted, repaired permissions and I have been on line IE 5.2.3, doing Mail and file transfers with a Windoze network my little G3 233MHz MiniTower (ethernet Comcast cable) all at the same time and not a single problem. The biggest thing is rebuild your permissions before and after installs...