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upgrade imac to os 10.3

excalibur313

excalibur313

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 7, 2003
780
5
Cambridge, MA
I have an imac that is running os 9 and I want to upgrade it to os x. I tried to install os 10.3 but it said that I could not upgrade from os 9 so i formatted it using disk utility then it said that it cannot upgrade when there is no os on the system. So i decided to install os 10.0 and it worked but when i try and upgrade that to os 10.3 it yells at me. Do you have any suggestions of how i can get panther on this bad boy?
Thanks,
Stephen
 
To get over 10.0 you needed to upgrade to the latest firmware (it's been rumored that you can actualy fry the mainboard by even attempting to install over 10.0 without the firmware upgrade; but I think thats possibly un-true; though i never tryed it that way)

So you'll need to get 9.2 on the machine, go to apple.com and download the latest firmware, then install 10.3 (it will boot and install directly from the cd then)... 10.0 works since it still used some of the os 9 boot codes that are no longer present in 10.1 and up.

I got 10.3.8 (still gotta run sys update for .9) is on my 333mhz imac, its actualy the system in my signature, and it runs decently fine (obviously slower on vnc since well... vnc is slow)
 
Well it said it was up to date and says that it cannot install mac os x on this volume and that it cannot upgrade to this version of mac os x. What's going on now?
 
Does anybody have any suggestions? At this point it seems like more of a problem that 10.3 says that it can't upgrade 9.0 when i really just want it to wipe it clean.
 
it's a 500mhz imac...it is 128 mb of ram but it will be upgraded soon and that shouldn't affect it installing though. It came out in the summer of 2001 which means that it was installed with 9.0 but also came with 10.0. I guess 10 was really unstable so it was never installed.
 
Should be fine as long as the firmware is updated with the correct version... http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macos/342 is probably the one you want, assuming you have a slot load... if you have a tray load you'll need another one, and I belive they make a 3rd one for something else.

Though as far as I know, you need to upgrade the firmware with 9.2 and if your going to upgrade you'll need to go from 9.2... Dunno why, but thats what I was told.
 
I had a similar iMac (500mhz 2001 model with 384MB of Ram) that ran Panther with no issues at all, so it's certainly possible to get it installed on your Mac. I kept mine up-to-date with the firmware updates so this may have helped. Also, I upgraded OS X version by version. You could maybe try doing a clean install with the copy of 10.0 that came with it and then upgrading to 10.3?
 
Well, two things come to mind so...
First and it's not certain but you may need more ram (256)
Then have you tried to update and what I should say is have you done a fresh (clean/custom) install of 9 then go onto 10 and so on? I only ask since my first iMac came with 9 and I had to install OSX. After that I went to Jaguar and did a custom install and never installed OS 9 on it.
Only thing else is to double check (I'm sure you have triple checked ;) ) your system, HDD space left, fix permissions...one last thing the disc is a cd and not a dvd? I'm not sure if you have a cd/dvd drive in yours. If its only a cd drive and the disc is a dvd then it will not install :eek: this is all I can think of at this time and hope this can help or some other replys do.
 
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