Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Powerbook G4 (Titanium) issues galore

D

DaKKs

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 15, 2012
474
43
Stockholm, Sweden
Bought a Tibook (A1025 1GHz) last week that I'm having issues with.

I reckon the PRAM battery is shot cause its takes ages to power up and always loses the time. It ran fine, albeit a bit jerky, on my test run. Brought it home and yanked the drive. Threw in a known good one, some good ram and fired it up. Wont install anything. Tried everything from OSX beta to 10.5 to Linux. Haven't tried installing OS9 since none of my discs work, apparently needs some recovery discs that is about as easy to find as a bloody unicorn.

Four things happen. It boots fine and then freezes on OS installation. It throws en error on OS installation. It refuses to boot altogether, loading circle on boot freezes or if i put in the stock drive, it boots to tiger and then freezes completely.

I know the ram is good, I know the drives are good and i can rule out corruption from a dodgy ODD since I even tried target disk mode. Nada. Hardware test comes back fine.

And the best part is that if it boot off my AluBook's drive via firewire, the bloody thing runs like a dream.

I'm stumped. I admit that I haven't worked with macs for very long, but I'm out of ideas. I ordered a new cable for the HDD off ebay, but the symptoms are more similar to the dodgy southbridge issue on older Thinkpads. Reckon its the board.
 
DaKKs said:
Bought a Tibook (A1025 1GHz) last week that I'm having issues with.

I reckon the PRAM battery is shot cause its takes ages to power up and always loses the time. It ran fine, albeit a bit jerky, on my test run. Brought it home and yanked the drive. Threw in a known good one, some good ram and fired it up. Wont install anything. Tried everything from OSX beta to 10.5 to Linux. Haven't tried installing OS9 since none of my discs work, apparently needs some recovery discs that is about as easy to find as a bloody unicorn.

Four things happen. It boots fine and then freezes on OS installation. It throws en error on OS installation. It refuses to boot altogether, loading circle on boot freezes or if i put in the stock drive, it boots to tiger and then freezes completely.

I know the ram is good, I know the drives are good and i can rule out corruption from a dodgy ODD since I even tried target disk mode. Nada. Hardware test comes back fine.

And the best part is that if it boot off my AluBook's drive via firewire, the bloody thing runs like a dream.

I'm stumped. I admit that I haven't worked with macs for very long, but I'm out of ideas. I ordered a new cable for the HDD off ebay, but the symptoms are more similar to the dodgy southbridge issue on older Thinkpads. Reckon its the board.
Click to expand...
I was going to suggest the HDD cable. Sounds like it's bad. If there were problems, like say with the logicboard, it still would not have run well in TDM.
 
It's likely that your hard drive is starting to fail. Have you thought about replacing it?
 
eyoungren said:
I was going to suggest the HDD cable. Sounds like it's bad. If there were problems, like say with the logicboard, it still would not have run well in TDM.
Click to expand...

I seem to recall having a bad HDD cable on one of my Tibooks with the same results.

Also my original Tibook 400mhz reacted strangely to the Tiger update back in the day and killed the pram battery. Once replaced, that Tibook ran for five more years.
 
California said:
I seem to recall having a bad HDD cable on one of my Tibooks with the same results.

Also my original Tibook 400mhz reacted strangely to the Tiger update back in the day and killed the pram battery. Once replaced, that Tibook ran for five more years.
Click to expand...

Actually it was the Panther update. I went from 9.2.2 to Panther in 2004 I believe.
 
Intell said:
It's likely that your hard drive is starting to fail. Have you thought about replacing it?
Click to expand...

I have tried four harddrives and a PATA SSD. Unless both a brand new SSD and a two year old HDD both died during the time it took to pull them from two working systems, I seriously doubt its the drives. Besides, my shelved replacement drives were all good too. And those didn't work either.

California said:
I seem to recall having a bad HDD cable on one of my Tibooks with the same results.

Also my original Tibook 400mhz reacted strangely to the Tiger update back in the day and killed the pram battery. Once replaced, that Tibook ran for five more years.
Click to expand...

The PRAM battery is almost certainly dead on this one, haven't found a good replacement yet, but that's on the to do list.

I've also ordered a cable off ebay, we'll see how that turns out next week.
 
HDD cables fail often enough that its definitely worth swapping out with a known good cable.

Newer Tech is sold out of PRAM batteries for the TiBooks, but you might be able to back-order one.
 
DaKKs said:
Bought a Tibook (A1025 1GHz) last week that I'm having issues with... Haven't tried installing OS9 since none of my discs work, apparently needs some recovery discs that is about as easy to find as a bloody unicorn.
Click to expand...

Not only is the disc super hard to find but it goes for crazy money. I have been outbid twice and have now given up. As an alternative, I found that an eMac OS9 installer disc will boot up on that TiBook. You cannot install the software but you can drag and drop the System Folder and Utilities Folder and that will give you a basic system to build from. The eMac disc number I have is Z691-3482-A.

There is a custom built boot disk for the DVI TiBooks that I found on a blog that will give you a fully working installation but it does contain third party software that should not be there so I am not so keen on that.
 
weckart said:
Not only is the disc super hard to find but it goes for crazy money. I have been outbid twice and have now given up. As an alternative, I found that an eMac OS9 installer disc will boot up on that TiBook. You cannot install the software but you can drag and drop the System Folder and Utilities Folder and that will give you a basic system to build from. The eMac disc number I have is Z691-3482-A.

There is a custom built boot disk for the DVI TiBooks that I found on a blog that will give you a fully working installation but it does contain third party software that should not be there so I am not so keen on that.
Click to expand...

Retail 9.something boots also. Refuses to install though.

I know the boot disc you mentioned. Havent managed to get it to boot. I'm probably doing something wrong, but so far i havent found it.
 
DaKKs said:
Retail 9.something boots also. Refuses to install though.

I know the boot disc you mentioned. Havent managed to get it to boot. I'm probably doing something wrong, but so far i havent found it.
Click to expand...

Retail boots but lacks extensions for all the hardware so is not a good choice. No installer will work. Apple disabled that for pretty much all the post 2002 hardware. OS9 was only intended to be used in Classic mode until developers ported their software over to OSX and even the TiBook's system disks installed Jaguar with OS9 tacked on without a separate installer/restore function.

You don't really need an installer for OS9, though. Drag and drop works just as well.
 
I have a 667 Ti with a bad pram battery,and I have no issues at all installing Tiger,Leopard (from image,bypassing leopard reg).

I'm also guessing it's your hdd cable,as you have tried a number of drives.
 
Apple produced hardware after retail OS9 came out. Some needed 9.2.2 and retail bootable installers stopped at 9.2.1. The rest needed extensions not found in the 9.2.2 update and therefore required custom installers/restore disks.
 
weckart said:
Apple produced hardware after retail OS9 came out. Some needed 9.2.2 and retail bootable installers stopped at 9.2.1. The rest needed extensions not found in the 9.2.2 update and therefore required custom installers/restore disks.
Click to expand...

Ah. I guess your best bet with those machines is to boot with OSX and then add 9.2.2.

Looks like the OP's problem is bigger than booting OS 9 though.
 
Okay, so the little bugger is finally up an running. The main issue was the HDD cable, but i came across a whole slew of issues after i replaced it. Kernel panics everywhere.

I ended up replacing the Airport card slot, the airport card, the ODD, the ODD cable and the HDD cable. So far so good, it seems to run okay. Been at it for three hours now.

Still haven't managed to install OS 9 though. Tried a whole bunch of discs, the legality of some of them might've been questionable, but at this point I'm way too annoyed to care. I must be doing something very wrong cause about half of them just throw me a floppy with a question mark. But at least Leopard runs fine.
 
Last edited:
DaKKs said:
Still haven't managed to install OS 9 though. Tried a whole bunch of discs, the legality of some of them mightn't been questionable, but at this point I'm way too annoyed to care. I must be doing something very wrong cause about half of them just throw me a floppy with a question mark. But at least Leopard runs fine.
Click to expand...

Just use the System Folder from the Netboot disk image downloadable from Apple. That definitely works on my A1025. Drop the folder on your hard drive if you are dual booting from the same volume as OSX. If you have partitioned your hard drive into separate volumes for OSX and OS9 make sure your OS9 folder has the MacOS driver installed. You can copy the OS9 Applications folder over from the retail disk.
 
weckart said:
Just use the System Folder from the Netboot disk image downloadable from Apple. That definitely works on my A1025. Drop the folder on your hard drive if you are dual booting from the same volume as OSX. If you have partitioned your hard drive into separate volumes for OSX and OS9 make sure your OS9 folder has the MacOS driver installed. You can copy the OS9 Applications folder over from the retail disk.
Click to expand...



how todo netbook install?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back