[Abit667]

So I procured a Dual G4 867 MDD that my dad bought a couple years ago, used twice and refused to touch since, or let anyone else use, complete waste of a decent machine. Anyway, I took it out the basement, got 1.5 gigs of ram in it and some more hds and it's running 10.3.9 great.

I want to install 10.4, but for some reason, it won't boot off the cd. Holding down C at startup or trying to choose the dvd with the menu thing doesn't do anything and it just boots straight back up into 10.3.9 off the hd. The dvd comes up fine in 10.3.9, and if you run the installer from there and it says it will restart and begin installing, it just restarts back into 10.3.9.

Is there somekind of firmware patch or something I need? I would try a new dvd drive, but I don't have one, and it reads the disc no problem from within 10.3.9 so I'm not so sure that's the issue. It has no problem booting 10.2.x or 10.3.x install discs.

[reader50]

Sounds like your MDD doesn't want to boot from that particular DVD for some reason. Is this a retail copy of Tiger, or the install DVD included with some other Mac model? If from another Mac model, then you need to obtain a retail DVD. The machine-specific install DVDs omit files needed for other models.

If it is a retail Tiger DVD, then it may be damaged. See if it will boot other Macs.

If it's just your DVD drive getting finicky after a few years in the basement, then use a clone utility to copy the install DVD to another partition on your HD. Then boot from there, and install to your main partition.

Uh, you followed the more common advice around here and didn't partition for booting/install flexibility? tsk, tsk. If you don't want to wipe your drive and repartition, then you'll need to borrow a 2nd HD from somewhere and temporarily put it in your MDD in order to try this trick. 10 GBs is plenty for cloning the install DVD.

[jcadam]

man, that sucks

[Abit667]

Originally Posted by reader50

Sounds like your MDD doesn't want to boot from that particular DVD for some reason. Is this a retail copy of Tiger, or the install DVD included with some other Mac model? If from another Mac model, then you need to obtain a retail DVD. The machine-specific install DVDs omit files needed for other models.

If it is a retail Tiger DVD, then it may be damaged. See if it will boot other Macs.

If it's just your DVD drive getting finicky after a few years in the basement, then use a clone utility to copy the install DVD to another partition on your HD. Then boot from there, and install to your main partition.

Uh, you followed the more common advice around here and didn't partition for booting/install flexibility? tsk, tsk. If you don't want to wipe your drive and repartition, then you'll need to borrow a 2nd HD from somewhere and temporarily put it in your MDD in order to try this trick. 10 GBs is plenty for cloning the install DVD.

It's a retail Tiger DVD, worked fine on my ibook and my friends powermac.

I didn't know you could boot the dvd image off another drive, I'll have to find a spare harddrive and try that. Hopefully that will work.

[Abit667]

Well I got it working, but not booting from the hd partition I made. After waiting forever for it to copy the cd I go to reboot, try to boot from the partition and it doesn't want too, reboot, and I see it's sitting at the white apple screen for a while. Then, what's that noise, oh the dvd drive, and it's booting the Tiger dvd after wasting all that time making a partition and cloning the dvd

At least it works now

[forevermac]

would suspect that it was down to a ram fault. To be honest with you, macs can be finikity when installing OS 10.4 had a customer with a 733mHz G4 that had the same problem. Pulled all the ram and stuck in a tested PC133 256 meg stick fully tested and it worked fine. Sometines, just letting the mac warm up sorts out problems. You could have also tried pulling the hard drive and reinstalling it when the mac had booted from DVD- ide is hot swap after all!