powermac g4 10.5 upgrade problem

[emosun]

I have a powermac g4 with the two 500mhz cpu's. I'm having trouble getting 10.5 to install. I'm currently using os 10.4 and am using a usb drive with os 10.5 on it.

I've already tried leopardassist 3.0 and 2.3.3.

3.0 seems to simply crash the finder (not the whole operating system) when I instruct it to restart the machine. I'm then forced to do a hard reset to get rid of the beach ball.

2.3.3 DOES seem to work and restarts the machine and brings up the drive selection for booting. When I select the usb drive , it stays on the grey loading screen forever.

The usb stick with 10.5 on it DOES boot correctly if I don't use leopardassist. I can get to the setup very easily but it simply says that the machine doesn't meet the requirements for os 10.5. I'm wondering if anyone with a dual 500mhz model has ever got 10.5 working.

I'm a windows guy and mostly a mac noob , but I can learn if anyone knows what the issue might be.

I understand the installer has to be tricked into thinking the machine passes its requirements , just need a bit of help with some other ideas as I'm fresh out of them.

 

[Dronecatcher]

I have a powermac g4 with the two 500mhz cpu's. I'm having trouble getting 10.5 to install. I'm currently using os 10.4 and am using a usb drive with os 10.5 on it.

Here are instructions to do it directly without an add-on helper app:

1. Reboot your Mac and hold down the Cmd-Opt-O-F keys until you get a white screen with black text. This is the Open Firmware prompt.

2. Insert the Mac OS X Leopard Install DVD.

3. Type the following lines exactly as shown below into the Open Firmware prompt. Be mindful of capitalization, spaces, zeros, etc. If the command is properly typed and understood, Open Firmware will display “ok” at the end of each line after you hit “return”. What these lines do is set the CPU speed reported by Open Firmware to OS X as an 867 MHz G4 processor system. They then continue the boot from the DVD drive.


dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@0
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@1
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
boot cd:,\\:tbxi

4. Continue the install normally.

5. This CPU setting is only in effect until the Mac reboots. Once OS X Leopard is installed and your Mac has rebooted, the proper CPU speed should once again be displayed when you select About This Mac under the Apple menu.

Some have noted problems booting the Leopard install disc using the above commands. If so, substitute “mac-boot” (without the quote marks) for the last line in the above Open Firmware commands. Also, if your Mac locks up hard during this process, resetting the PRAM (start your Mac and immediately hold down Cmd-Opt-P-R until your Mac restarts) should bring it back to life.

 

[emosun]

2. Insert the Mac OS X Leopard Install DVD.

this 10.5 is on a usb flash drive , the machine doesn't have a dual layer drive for the actual disk. will "mac-boot" on the last line still work?

 

[emosun]

ok that did work , the 10.5 installer now proceeds with the install.

However , half way through the installation I get what google says is a "kernel panic" and get a simple message in the middle of the screen saying to reboot the machine.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Looks like a hardware issue that could be any number of things, RAM misbehaving, GPU problem, hard drive, motherboard. Before installing Leopard you could use the installer disk utlity to zero out and erase the drive - this sometimes identifies and isolates any bad sectors. Also try reseating the RAM and GPU - there's no extra hardware onboard is there that might disagree with Leopard?