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Problem with Tiger (10.4) installer

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shirsch

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I picked up a desklamp-style Power Mac 4,2 (aka iMac G4). It came with OS X 10.2 installed and I was able to upgrade with Tiger 10.4.6 using an image from Mac Garden. So far, so good. Next move was to replace the Seagate ATA drive with a 500GB SSD from OWC. Installation was a bit fussy, but I was able to get it done after a bit of headscratching. Once back together I booted the Tiger installer, only to have it hang with a spinning beachball just after accepting the license. After numerous attempts I booted a 10.2 installer, which cooperated just fine and I was able to bring up the entire system on the new SSD drive. After verifying proper operation of the SSD, I tried again to install Tiger. No luck - just the same hang at the same place. Interestingly, the disk utility on the installer DVD behaved in exactly the same manner. According to the installer console log, it comes back from probing the SSD and just. Goes. Away. I've since burned several different point-versions of Tiger installer, substituted an external firewire DVD drive and basically done everything I can think of to work around the hang. Nothing has worked. It still continues to boot the installed 10.2 system from SSD without incident but Tiger just won't cooperate. Has anyone seen this sort of behavior? I'm running out of ideas.
 
I had the same issues with Tiger on my Powerbook G3 Pismo after installing a 2.5" IDE SSD. No luck at all. Tiger is known to be *very* picky when it comes to RAM and hard drives. I had to revert back to a normal hard disk to get it running.

If anything, you need to try a different SSD. There is probably nothing you can do to get the one working you have installed right now.
 
Oh, ugh. But, this is why I always deal with OWC for ancient Mac hardware upgrades. I have reached out to their tech support folks and am confident they'll let me return it for a refund if it cannot be made to cooperate. The machine is also super fussy about DRAM. Although everymac.com claims the unit can support 2G of memory, the external SO-DIMM slot will not physically accept double-sided modules and I cannot find a single-sided 1G part. Similarly, a PC133 1GB DIMM is not recognized on the internal slot. So I'm not sure where this 2GB claim comes from.
 
Just to follow up: After expanding the memory to 1GB I was able to skip over Tiger (10.4) and install Leopard (10.5) from the retail DVD. The installer needs to be faked out by setting the CPU speed manually under Open Firmware or by running "leopardassist" from an existing installation (must be >= 10.2). Leopard updates are incredibly slow to apply, but it appears to be making headway. Leopard also need 512MB (minimum) of memory to install and leopardassist will warn if that's not the case. Hope this proves helpful to someone.
 
I'm sure you are correct, but it would have been helpful if 'everymac' was more forthcoming. After receiving and installing a 1GB upgrade kit (DIMM + SO-DIMM) from OWC I'm off and running. The SO-DIMM is double-sided, but in a "low profile" form factor.
 
The fine nuances of memory configurations are almost never documented across any platform unfortunately. You usually have to end up experimenting with different module types to figure out what will and won't work.

I have an AST 486 where it was never documented that it supported 64 MB of RAM (2 x 32M), but both modules must be FPM and not EDO. If EDO is used, the system won't POST.
 
As a followup for Leopard on flat-screen iMac G4/700: This may be a pyhric victory. Two days ago I installed Macports and commenced a build that required gcc7. It's still working on it. With Tiger on the original spinning media this entire exercise took about 11 hours. I guess there's a reason why Apple originally restricted Leopard to faster hardware.
 
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