I recently got a free iBook g4. 14 In, 1.42GHz, 512 Mb Ram, 60Gb Hard Drive, Superdrive, Bluetooth, Airport. One Of the best ones i think? Well my friend found it in a cleanout, and found no use for it and gave it to me. There was a password on it so i used a leopard disc to format the drive, but it wouldnt install leopard. So all it would do is boot up to a question mark folder, which means theres no bootable os on the drive. But when i put my tiger disc in(the tiger disc that came with my macbook), to try and install tiger, as it goes to the apple logo and trys to boot to the install, the thing kernal panics! it wont load to the tiger install. It actually shows the report on the screen . The first line reads "panic(cpu 0 caller 0x002E54BC): Unable to find driver for this platform: "PowerBook6,7"." Its not hard to figure out that it cant find drivers, but for a powerbook?!? Im using a iBook, does anyone have any idea whats going on here? If anyone needs the rest of the panic log let me know, i can write the whole thing here. Please help, i would love to use this ibook.
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Help iBook G4 Problems!
- Thread starter greenday123
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That may be why it was in a cleanout! 
I wouldn't think a Tiger disc (or any OS) would be made specific for hardware. Have you tried to boot to the disc and install from there? I think you can run some diagnostics from there as well.
Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the "C" key until the spinning gear appears beneath the dark gray Apple logo. (Had to look that up)
btw I'm running Leopard on my 1.67g Powerbook and my 1.07g iBook.
I wouldn't think a Tiger disc (or any OS) would be made specific for hardware. Have you tried to boot to the disc and install from there? I think you can run some diagnostics from there as well.
Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the "C" key until the spinning gear appears beneath the dark gray Apple logo. (Had to look that up)
btw I'm running Leopard on my 1.67g Powerbook and my 1.07g iBook.
Well it was booting when i got it, i dont know what it had on it, but it was definatly osx, but there was a password on it. So i just formatted the hard drive, assuming tiger would go on there no problem. But when it tries to boot from the disc it just kernal panics. i havent tried running the diagnostics yet, but i will try. And i did run the Disk Utility off the leopard disc and the hard drive passed with no problems when i tested it.
Here are a few pieces of info that might help:
1) The system uses codenames for all Apple computers that are of the form text number, number. They're just codes. For whatever reason, all the iBooks are listed as variants of the Powerbook tree. So powerbook6,7 is the normal designation for that iBook in the OS's speak.
2) When you say you tried to use Leopard and Tiger discs, where exactly did they come from? System restore discs will only work on the hardware they were made for -- for instance, you cannot use a Leopard system restore disc from an iMac on a Macbook Pro (or an iBook). Also Leopard System Restore discs may not contain all PPC files, as they're made for Intel Macs.
3) For the Tiger discs, you are going to be in a toughie... retail Tiger discs may not work because they pre-date that Mac (that iBook came out after Tiger; typically, OS X installation discs that are older than a given computer do not work on it. I.E. you cannot install Panther on a Mac that shipped with Tiger using normal means). Again, (2) applies, so Tiger system restore discs will also not work unless they're for that specific model (not only iBook but that specific revision of the iBook G4).
Sorry that this isn't easy news. You may be able to find the appropriate system restore discs on eBay. I could be wrong about retail Tiger discs, so if you're not using retail Tiger discs, that's worth a try also.
The last option is that, assuming you have a valid license for either Tiger or Leopard that you can use with this Mac, you might be able to get it to install via Firewire target disk mode -- connect it to another Mac via firewire, hold down T while turning it on, power up the other Mac, and it will come up as a disk drive on the other Mac. Then, you can just boot the Tiger or Leopard disc from the other computer and then choose the iBook drive as the destination. This may get around the issue of, say, the Tiger retail disc being too old -- it may install and you may be able to boot or safe boot and then update Tiger.
1) The system uses codenames for all Apple computers that are of the form text number, number. They're just codes. For whatever reason, all the iBooks are listed as variants of the Powerbook tree. So powerbook6,7 is the normal designation for that iBook in the OS's speak.
2) When you say you tried to use Leopard and Tiger discs, where exactly did they come from? System restore discs will only work on the hardware they were made for -- for instance, you cannot use a Leopard system restore disc from an iMac on a Macbook Pro (or an iBook). Also Leopard System Restore discs may not contain all PPC files, as they're made for Intel Macs.
3) For the Tiger discs, you are going to be in a toughie... retail Tiger discs may not work because they pre-date that Mac (that iBook came out after Tiger; typically, OS X installation discs that are older than a given computer do not work on it. I.E. you cannot install Panther on a Mac that shipped with Tiger using normal means). Again, (2) applies, so Tiger system restore discs will also not work unless they're for that specific model (not only iBook but that specific revision of the iBook G4).
Sorry that this isn't easy news. You may be able to find the appropriate system restore discs on eBay. I could be wrong about retail Tiger discs, so if you're not using retail Tiger discs, that's worth a try also.
The last option is that, assuming you have a valid license for either Tiger or Leopard that you can use with this Mac, you might be able to get it to install via Firewire target disk mode -- connect it to another Mac via firewire, hold down T while turning it on, power up the other Mac, and it will come up as a disk drive on the other Mac. Then, you can just boot the Tiger or Leopard disc from the other computer and then choose the iBook drive as the destination. This may get around the issue of, say, the Tiger retail disc being too old -- it may install and you may be able to boot or safe boot and then update Tiger.
I just tried booting into diagnostics, by holding down the "D" key. It gave me the same exact kernal panic.
Okay thats what i thought, that because i was using a macbook tiger disc, and a macbook leopard disc, thats why it wasnt working. And the 1 disc of my panther installation discs for an ibook is cracked so i guess ill be going on ebay for a new installation disc.
so i guess ill be going on ebay for a new installation disc.