Wacky acting Finder in 10.3.4 on iMac DV

[Bob Weaver]

Hi. I have an iMac DV SE, that I bought in 1999, and I still use it as a DVD-burning station with an attached LaCie DVD burner. The iMac is a G3 at 400Mhz. Until yesterday, it was running OSX successfully, I am pretty sure it was 10.2.8, and it ran with no problems.

Yesterday I forgot about the old adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Last summer, I bought a new eMac which came with 10.3.4 installed and an installation disc for 10.3.4. As an experiment, I ran that installation disc on the old iMac, since the iMac met all the system requirements specified on the disc.

Before doing that, I also ran the iMac Firmware update, but it told me that the iMac was up-to-date and didn't need the update.

The installation of 10.3.4 ran without any error messages. It took almost an hour to finish, but it appeared to be successful. I also ran the Disk Utility program on the installation disc, and did both "Repair permissions" and "Repair disk" and those completed with no error messages.

The iMac now boots with 10.3.4, but the Finder is wacky and won't operate. The menu bar in the Finder disappears and then reappears every 5 seconds or so, and no icons appear on the desktop - not even the hard drive icon.

The Finder will not react to any keyboard or mouse input. The only thing that will respond is the dock, and fortunately I had put a few applications on the dock before I tried this upgrade. Those programs will operate normally, I can even run Toast and burn a DVD from an image file, and that works normally.

It seems to be that the Finder won't work. I have tried force quitting and choosing to relaunch the Finder, but that doesn't change anything. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks!

[hayne]

You should try the standard troubleshooting suggestions:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2004011205473937
http://forums.osxfaq.com/viewtopic.php?t=7269
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/faqs.html

But note that the Install CDs that come with a computer are usually specific for that model of Mac. You usually can't use them (even disregarding licensing issues) to install OS X on a different model. So consider yourself lucky that you got as far as you did.
You probably should backup and reinstall OS X on your old iMac using the Install CDs that came with it.

[DavidRavenMoon]

The disks that come with one Mac won't necessarily work on another. Unless you are using the retail Panther installer you might have problems. Apple makes different builds for different Macs. You might try downloading the combo 10.3.8 updater and giving that a run. It might update the install to run correctly on the iMac DV.

[Bob Weaver]

OK, thank you for your reply. I will try those suggestions. Seems like the installer disc should have told me that I was attempting to install it on a Mac that it wasn't made for. The installer disc gave no such warning.

[hayne]

Seems like the installer disc should have told me that I was attempting to install it on a Mac that it wasn't made for.
I guess that the installer can't tell - at least not soon enough. Or maybe Apple just didn't bother to implement this check because they figured you were adequately warned by the licence agreement that came with the disks (that said it is only for use on the machine it came with) or by the fact that the CDs are labeled (I presume) "eMac".

[Bob Weaver]

This makes no sense to me: The disc is marked "eMac" on the disc itself, yet when you insert the disc and run the Installer program, the Installer program gives specific instructions for installing OSX onto an iMac, including information about partitioning the hard drive and updating the firmware. If this disc was truly for eMac only, why did they include iMac installation instructions?