As the title says, Im having some problems installing 10.4 on my Power Mac. I bought the Power Mac used, knowing it didnt come with a hard drive, but that wasnt a big deal for me since I had a spare 80 gig lying around. I installed the hard drive, then tried installing OS 10.4 via CDs and it will not install. It goes through the first part of the installation process, tells me to restart the computer, and then restarts the whole thing from the beginning. At first I thought it was the Power Macs CD drive, so I replaced it, but the same thing happened. Then I thought it was the CDs, so I tried them in my G3 iMac and they worked fine. Does anyone have any idea of whats going on?
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Need help installing OS X 10.4 on a G4 Power Mac Gigabit Ethernet model
- Thread starter ethan86
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The Power Mac has 512mb of RAM and a 500Mhz processor. Almost the same exact specs as my iMac, which is running 10.4 just fine.
Is the drive properly formatted to the Apple Partition Table with HFS+ (Mac Os Extended) format?
Where did the old 80g drive come from?
Unless if it came from another old PM, then you should booting up to the system disk, then use Disk Utility to partition it properly. Although, I don't know if the installation would recognize or even begin the install process if it weren't. If you select the drive while in DU (not the volume, "Mac HD", but the one listed above it, SAMSUNG 897364 or whatever it is) it will show you the information for it at the bottom of the window.
I know the CD installation could be problematic, but I would double check that the machine is even trying to boot up to the hard drive after the installation is complete. Maybe the Startup Disk isn't switching to the hard drive like it should, but is in fact still trying to boot to the cd when it's complete?
Just kind of tossing these out there....
Where did the old 80g drive come from?
Unless if it came from another old PM, then you should booting up to the system disk, then use Disk Utility to partition it properly. Although, I don't know if the installation would recognize or even begin the install process if it weren't. If you select the drive while in DU (not the volume, "Mac HD", but the one listed above it, SAMSUNG 897364 or whatever it is) it will show you the information for it at the bottom of the window.
I know the CD installation could be problematic, but I would double check that the machine is even trying to boot up to the hard drive after the installation is complete. Maybe the Startup Disk isn't switching to the hard drive like it should, but is in fact still trying to boot to the cd when it's complete?
Just kind of tossing these out there....
I've used Disk Utility every time I've tried installing the OS, but it keeps restarting from the beginning. How can I make sure the Startup Disk is switching to the hard drive?
You can hold down the OPTION key when the machine starts up to do a one time boot to any available bootable devices (internal drives, externals with OSes loaded, system DVDs/CDs, network drives) that are connected to the machine (you can let go of the opt key when you see the devices start to list on screen, you'll know it when you see it). If the system is installed, but doesn't display on that list then there may be a problem with the drive or the installation, however, if it is successful you can then just boot to it and then go to the Sys Prefs and change the startup disk from there.
Alternatively, you can boot up to the system cd and go to the Startup Disk option from one of the menu items (same place DU is, Utilities I think).
I know that the Tiger CD installation was more problematic than the normal DVD installation, but of course, that may be your only (easy) option.
Update: I got the Power Mac to work and figured out what was wrong. Turns out when I went to erase the hard drive, I wasn’t completely erasing it. On the Erase tab in Disk Utility, the default option was set to “Do Not Erase Data” (or something along those words). When I went to erase the drive, I never bothered going into options and changing the default. I actually feel kinda dumb when I realized what I wasn’t doing. Oh well, now I know. The Power Mac is up and running great, with over a gig of ram.