iBook G4 won't boot from firewire

[apathy]

Greetings,

We have a huge shipment of iBook G4s that we have to install from firewire images, however they lock up on booting from the firewire drive.

I know the drive is okay as I booted from it on a G4 iMac with no issues at all. We have had this problem on 2 separate iBooks, with 2 separate firewire drives (same image on each drive).

I booted up with verbose (apple+v) mode, and it goes through most of startup. Says Welcome to Macintosh, some more stuff, then:

/etc/rc Line 286: 164 Hang up {some more stuff here}

Then there are a few more lines after that about power changes, and then the startup stops.

If anybody has any information on this, I would greatly appreciate it. It is slowing us down and the school year is about to start. :(

[trevor]

Exactly what are the images on the FireWire drive? Be excruciatingly detailed, then add more detail. What computer are they from? What version of OS X are they? Exactly which iBook G4?

It sounds very much like you're either using a version of OS X older than these iBook G4s, or else you're using an install of OS X specific to something other than an iBook G4.

Trevor

[apathy]

The images we install on the firewire drive is just a .dmg, but I can't even get to that point yet. The firewire drive has an OSX system on it that we boot up, and it is hanging when I boot from this drive. It may be an old version of OSX though, could that be the problem? It will boot up on an iMac G4, but not on these new iBook G4s. I want to say a 10.3 system is on the drive.

If that is the case I can just upgrade the systems.

[trevor]

Yes, it could definitely be the fault of a version of OS X older than the computer that you are trying to boot. If you can give us some detail about the iBooks and the version of OS X, we can confirm that.

Trevor

[apathy]

Just wanted to verify that this indeed worked. After updating the OS on the firewire drive to 10.4, the iBooks booted from them perfectly.

Thanks trevor!