issue installing leopard/tiger on Imac G4 1.0ghz

Hi all,

as per the other post, ive got a Imac 17inch 1.0ghz with 215mb ddr ram.

anyways, as Sheepy suggested, i upgraded her to a nice speedy 500GB 7200 Sata drive and dropped 1.5gb ram into her...... but lets take a step back...

when i got her, she was full of dust and had tiger on her.. no dramas, tiger is good. anyways, i wanted to do a reinstall of tiger, and so grabbed my tiger retail disk and started her up, no dramas there either, ran disk util, repartitioned (the old disk) and started to install...

the install never finished and then it just rebooted after about 80% through... The reboot came to the disk flashing with the osx face and a question mark...

I try a few more times, with the same result, and also with Leopard, also with the same result, but the leopard install actually tells me after about 80% that "Install failed" try again?

anyways, so i think its a shagged optical drive.. \no dramas i have a few lying around and i need to get in there anyways to upgrade the hard drive....

installing the HD and the new Optical drive went fine, all works well.. and while i was there also installed 500mb ddr400 stick in the main memory non user slot..

close her up, checked the heatsink matchup spots and there dry as a nuns nasty.. theres no paste on them, but kinda like a pad.. (which isnt even sticky either) anyways, i stick em back together (without) cleaning the pad stuff nor with applying any paste and boot her up...


*chime* <-- phew...

I insert the leopard disk to istall and it all goes fine, i re-partition the newspeedy 7200rpm sata disk and start the install...

and again.... gets to about 90% and reboots......
same bloody thing.. flashing smily face with alternating question mark...

anything you guys can suggest?

cheers

Doh!!! Swapped out the ram, cleaned the heatsink contacts and applied thermal paste.... Still no joy. There is no airport card installed...

Still won't install.. I've now tried panther, leopard and tiger.. Same result.

I've also zapped pram and nvram...

It seems when I go to disk utills, it takes forever to find the hard drive. I've swapped back to the other hard drive also, and still the same result.

Normally when using disk until, it pretty much finds the disk instantly in my other macs, this one takes one to two minutes to find it....

Any ideas?

yeah sata convertor works fine, its displaying the same behaviour as with the old original pata drive..

Sheepy, mate, its refusing to go into Target mode...

holding down "t" will result in just a black screen.. nothing untill i reset it again... trippy...

freakingly weird....

I was about to chuck said mac in the bin, when iu cam across an old 40gb pata drive (windows XP or some crap on it), so decide to give it one more try...

put crappy old drive in there and what do you know, works like a charm....

WTF???

anyhows, now works great! but only has crappy 40gb drive... lol

at the moment, i only have 512mb of ram in her main non user socket, and cant for the life of me remember where i left that other 1gb sodimm... (the whole mac was left in pieces when i got the ***** with it a while back)

so with only 512MB, is it worth installing Leopard?

cheers