Lombard/Pismo install problem

[martinlangley]

Hi all, this may sound a bit strange but I'm sure you guys will come up to the mark.

I have a powerpc based laptop which has performed faultlessly for me for the past decade and has survived the transition from Mac OS9 TO OS X together with replacement hard disks etc.

The present problem has me stumped, however. I have a new hard drive in the bay ready for a fresh OS X install of Leopard or Tiger or any OS X which supports PPC. I have tried every which way to get it to boot, from holding down the option key and trying to use a CD to booting via open firmware and installing from a USB. The furthest I have got (by any method) results in a brief "XCOFF" message being displayed followed by a couple of memory address locations and then the system hangs.

Does this sound familiar to anybody? What surprises me is that the machine is quite happy to POST, - I get the chime and it switches into Open Firmware on opt + cmd + O + F so the problem would seem unlikely to be anything fundamental, but I simply do not know what to try next.

I'm sure one of you guys will know a fix.


The attached images show what happens, the first is the command string to boot from the usb, -

boot ud:3,\System\Library\CoreServices\BootX

The second is the resulting XCOFF message

Best regards

Martin

 

[repairedCheese]

A quick search says that a Lombard doesn't actually support Tiger, at least not without some help. And apparently that's not the case with a Pismo. Any chance you could be more specific with the hardware you're trying to run Tiger on?

 

[AphoticD]

Does it boot without the new HDD? If so, it could be either an incompatible drive or a jumper setting issue - if the HDD has any jumper pins to force master mode, try that.

Otherwise, I would try reseating or swapping out the RAM modules.

 

[Amethyst1]

A quick search says that a Lombard doesn't actually support Tiger, at least not without some help.

A Lombard will still happily boot into Tiger's installer - which will then say it's unsupported because the model identifier is part of the badMachines list. But patching that list is all it takes to make Tiger embrace a Lombard.