I've been banging my head against this one all week. Every time I try to install Tiger (retail DVD) to a mirrored volume on an Acard 6880M, the installation stalls at some point -- it's a different point every time. After some tens of minutes, maybe an hour, a message appears "Please try to install again" or something similarly terse, and the machine is locked up. Neither the menu items, nor the "go back" button work. I must force power off.
However, Tiger installs fine to Firewire drives, or drives attached to the buit-in busses. So I think it's an Acard issue, but I don't see anything in their FAQs indicating that there is a problem, and Google searching on 6880M and Tiger hasn't turned up the spate of comments one would expect to find, if there were a problem. I sent their support an email, but I don't have high hopes because it's a product they don't market any more. I think, perhaps, I should test the mirrored volume. Is there a utility which will transfer gigabytes of data on and off the drive and report if there are any CRC errors in the process? The drive seems to be fine, and Disk Utility gives it a clean bill, but it's the only thing I can think left for me to check. Could be a cable integrity issue or some such. While I'm asking about test utilities, what is good for testing RAM on the MDD? The 1.5 GB in there has never given us a lick of trouble, but I have another .5GB stick, I'd like to install, but I want to test it thoroughly after installation. I have a single CPU 1.25 GHz MDD here with 1.5 GB of RAM. It never gave us any trouble until one of the Maxtor 250 GB drives died (a slow death with lots of time to backup, yay!). First I installed the 6880M with no drives, and updated the firmware to 2.45 (latest). I attached a pair of Seagate 400 GB drives as masters, installed the latest Acard drivers and used Disk Utlities Restore function to clone the machine's old 80 GB Leopard drive to the 400 GB mirrored volume. Now one hiccup I had after that was that when I selected the new mirrored volume in Startup Disk, it still booted from the original drive, but I removed the original drive and everything seemed okay. I mention it only for completeness. Then I installed a new pair of Maxtor 250 GB (6L250R0) drives as slaves and used the Tiger install DVD to try to install Tiger. However, every time I do, the install process stalls at some point. At first it was usually during "installing Essentials"; 22%, 73%, 66% were various places it stalled. But later it made it further, to print drivers, or languages, just to taunt me and suggest that this time it might work all the way through. I've tried replacing one of the cables (don't have a spare for the other cable handy), switching the Acard back to Regular/non-RAID mode and initializing the drives individually, then back to RAID mode, repeatedly installed the Acard Driver (seems to be a driver that actually goes on the disk, not in the OS), tried the install DVD in two different optical drives, and probably several things I've forgotten. Oh, yes, pulled the Acard and installed it in an OS9 machine to use the OS9 firmware update utility to confirm that the firmware really was updated. Finally, late late last night (or early this morning) I hooked up a Firewire drive, installed Tiger to that, then used Disk Utility's Restore function to clone the Firewire drive to the Maxtor mirrored volume. That will probably work, but darn-it, the Tiger DVD install should work. Any ideas? Or just funny comments. I'd settle for a laugh at this point. -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
