iMac G4 hangs during install 10.5 Leopard

Open the Installer log as soon as it starts and watch what it does. Press Command-L to open it and change it to show all of the information instead of errors only. What does it stop on?

 

And it stops at those lines? How long have you let it sit at those lines? Have you tried repartitioning the drive with Disk Utility?

 

Every time you try to reinstall Leopard, make sure you erase the hard drive. This will get rid of any left over files. Is the Leopard dvd scratched or known to be a good disc?

 

Do you have any other Macs?

 

Do you have a FireWire cable? If you do, put the Intell iMac into Target Disk Mode and put the Leopard DVD in it. Connect it to the G4 and install Leopard via the Intell iMac's optical drive.

 

Motherboard

I bet his motherboard is failing because of bad caps and the installer is just erroring out. Does it boot 10.4 just fine? I'm sure it doesn't. With the lines on the screen and the installer issue I'm sure it's a matter of time before it stops doing anything.


Wait hmmm iMac G4, have you looked into replacing the internal pram battery? Mine got funny when it went bad. It's the same as yours just the 20 inch model. You may just get lucky. Also the DVD drive could be really dirty so the FireWire target disk mode is a great idea.

Good luck.

 

G4 iMacs don't suffer from bad caps. The optical drive could be going bad. Some G4 era optical drives do have a harder time of reading DVDs as they age. G4 iMacs work just fine with a dead PRAM battery, they just don't keep the time.

 

^^^ This when i got my 20" iMac G4 i had to use target disk mode to install and its been fine ever since

 

The optical drive in mine would install Tiger perfectly but take absolutely forever with Leopard, sometimes hanging up completely....could have been the discs.

I switched out to a brand new dvd drive and everything installed just fine.

I was very close to Target Disk Mode but held out just because I wanted to know if it was the DVD drive or not and it was.


I then went back to Tiger and installed a WD Velociraptor HDD that I had lying around. Leopard was just crazy laggy.
Could be the RAM, I have the 1GHz G4 with 768MB RAM.

Anyone else have a similar machine with more RAM and Leopard? Safari is almost completely un usable, scrolling up or down a page was like a slide show.

 

I have Leopard on my 1Ghz iMac G4 with only 768MB of ram. It's rather quick and usable.

 

i would bet it is ram or hdd. my mate had a similar error and it was ram and hdd (yes, both) oh and the bad ram was the factory installed stuff

 

Well I may try re-installing Leopard tonight and give it another try. Possibly stop by FRYs tomorrow and grab some more or new RAM.

 

Of course my G4 iMac is not running what could be called a stock configuration anymore. Nor is it running that butchered PowerPC optimized version.

 

I'm actually installing Leopard to my G4 iMac via USB3 thumb drive.

I just did a restore 10.5 to USB through Disk Utility, hit Option during Start up and Mac OS X Install Disk showed up, clicked it and it is definitely installing.

For some reason I thought you had to go through some long process by booting into open firmware and force boot to the USB drive in order for it to work.

 

All post-1999 PowerPC Macs can boot right off of a USB drive with any OpenFirmware changes.

 

Well hell, I never even tried it before from USB I just put the disk in, I guess I'm still learning something everyday.

It is taking absolutely forever to install though. I went from 5hr install time to 1hr 27min back to 2hr 20min with the load bar about 1/4 of the way.

 

Do you have the reinstallation disc for your 2008 iMac? If you do, you can still get Leopard onto that G4 iMac. Using Disk Utility on the 2008 iMac, make another partition on its hard drive. Install Leopard onto that partition using its reinstallation DVD. The retail Leopard DVD will not work as it is too old to support that iMac. Once the installation is complete, run Software Update and update everything. Trust me, update Leopard on the 2008 iMac instead of the G4. In Disk Utility on the 2008 iMac format the G4's hard drive with HFS+ and AMP with it in Target Disk Mode. When the formatting is complete, start CarbonCopyCloner and clone the new Leopard partition from the 2008 iMac onto the G4 iMac. Once that is done, you can startup the G4 into Leopard and remove the extra Leopard partition from the 2008 iMac.