Weird Panther death, failure of Jaguar replacement on Beige G3

[Norm Nager]

Help solve this frustrating puzzler. Please.

Although I had no problem in the past in installing Jaguar on my 266-mhz Beige G3 (rev A) and even ran OS 10.2.8 for several months without a problem, today I can't even get within 2 minutes of completion of installation of 10.2 before the picture dies.

Something weird happened while I was running Panther 10.3.2 and using an Apple Studio Display, the first enabled by XPostFacto, and both the OS and ASD enabled by a brand new Radeon 7000 Mac Edition card. Panther ran perfectly for two weeks. On startup a couple days ago, no picture. Switched to an old CRT, but no Panther. A month ago, I installed a fresh PRAM battery. I have no clock problems, only keeping a picture on the screen when trying to replace Panther with Jaguar.

Ultimately, after a lot of diagnostic and repair efforts failed, I pulled the Radeon 7000 card, erased the Panther volume, and tried to install Jaguar from the 10.2.0 CD. Every time, it seems to install fine until when the progress bar shows only two or three minutes remaining. Then the screen goes dark. After a half hour or so, I turn off the computer and then restart.

I do not lose the picture with OS 9.2.2.

Erasing the volume and re-installing OS 10.2 results in the same lost picture at about the same point and failed installation. Zapped PRAM. Reset Open Firmware. Pressed the PMU/CUDA button. A command-s startup fails to fix the problem.

I got further yesterday before I pulled the Radeon 7000 ME card: I had 10.2 installed and then the picture died in the midst of using the combo updater to 10.2.8. At another point, I was able to get 10.2.8 installed but in the midst of Software Update of maybe the fourth or fifth update, the screen went dark and the picture was lost.

Disk Utility, DiskWarrior and TechTool Pro could not help at that point or in other failed attempts when I had a Jaguar OS. It went downhill after a command-s startup and /sbin/fsck -y could not fix an overlapped file issue. I stopped DiskWarrior when its progress bar stalled out for the an hour while it kept counting the number of overlapped files it had found: 105 when I powered-out of DiskWarrior. I erased the OS X drive once again Today, I can't even install 10.2.0

Could something be wrong with the on-board video? But would that have been an issue when I was using the Radeon 7000 ME card?

Your counsel, please?

[Norm Nager]

I pressed the PMU/CUDA button this morning after making sure that all cards were well-seated.

I ran TechTool Pro 4.0.1's Hardware tests panel, with and without the Radeon 7000 Mac Edition card . All tests passed.

I'm at a loss of what to do next to find whatever hardware problem is interfering with Jaguar installation.

[DeltaMac]

Try removing extra memory until you have 256 MB or less. This has been a help with some stubborn G3 installs. You should be able to reinstall other memory after OS X is reinstalled.

[Norm Nager]

Quote: Originally posted by DeltaMac Try removing extra memory until you have 256 MB or less. This has been a help with some stubborn G3 installs. You should be able to reinstall other memory after OS X is reinstalled.

Aha! It's not a matter of how much RAM I have but how much of it is bad RAM. Thanks very much, Delta Mac. 64 mb of RAM that was part of the original Beige G3 had to be moved . . . all the way to the nearest trash can.

(Before that, I checked out the Radeon 7000 card and DVI-ADC card by moving it and the old 15" Apple Studio Display and connecting all to the G4, where they worked just fine!)

Thanks for your concern and good lead on RAM!

Respectfully, Norm