So I got a Cube the other day, and I have basically been working on the thing for the past 2 days trying to get Leopard on it. I have pulled the drive probably 5 times now, and I am hoping it will stay there now. Anyhow, the Cube came to me running Tiger, I wanted/need Leopard, so I threw the HDD in my Quad and installed Leopard. I ran through the setup and the install and the drive are both fine. It was brought to my attention that the Cubes need a firmware upgrade to be able to boot Leopard, as mine KP's right when the spinning gear shows up. So I installed OS 9.2.2 and am currently trying to update the firmware, but the .smi file wont open. It throws an error "Error -39" or something, I seriously need this to work, cause otherwise Tiger is gonna be stuck on it and then I really can't use it too much.
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Resolved Help Upgrading PowerMac G4 Cube's Firmware?
- Thread starter MacCubed
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Not sure if this will help but try downloading the firmware from here maybe?
http://www.pure-mac.com/appud.html#g4cfwud
http://www.pure-mac.com/appud.html#g4cfwud
@bunnspecial provided me with an upload from the Apple website that he put on Dropbox, the issue was that everytime I downloaded the file on my MBP, it expanded the .bin leaving me with the .sit file. So I went on the cube and downloaded it from Dropbox, and it worked! Once the update finished, I tried booting Leopard annndddd a KP. Again. So I'm gonna boot it in verbose mode when I get home and see what the issue is. Either way the drive is probably gonna end up getting pulled AGAIN
Yeah, I eventually fixed the problem.
1. The Cube (along with other OS9 capable Macs) require the firmware updater software be run in OS 9.
2. I had to download the firmware update directly on the Cube, as every time I attempted to download it on my MBP, then move it to the Cube, the .bin would expand and leave a .sit. Whenever I tried to decompress the .sit it refused to work, so I just downloaded the .bin directly onto the Cube
3. (Remember that this is trying to get Leopard on a 450MHz Cube with 256MB RAM) I had the HDD from the Cube in my Quad to install Leopard, as you can use Leopard Assist on the Cube to install, but it required 512MB RAM. Since the drive was in the Quad, I moved it back into the Cube to test if I fixed it or not. I booted it up, and it threw another kernel panic. I decided to pull the drive one last time to see what it would do. On my Quad, I tried booting it, but nothing would come up on the display. So for the last time, I booted off of my Leopard install USB, and then erased the drive and reinstalled Leopard. I tested it on my Quad and completed the setup, and then put the drive back in the Cube and crossed my fingers. It booted up perfectly fine, and was fully working
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Also, this thread isn't as bad as some of the other ones. I posted this thread back in December of 2015 when I got my Cube, it's only been around 4-5 months since it was last replied to. Some are around 4-5 years since they were last replied to! The main issue here is that the PPC macs subforum is definitely the oldest subfourm on MR, maybe the iPod sub predates it, but I'm not too sure. I think threads from before say, 2010 be archived, as they are annoying to be revived as much as they are.