Hiya, I've been struggling for the last few weeks to get OS X working on my Power Tower Pro (Maxpowr G3 / 256 MB / various SCSI HDs). I've been trying XPostFacto and every trick I can think off. I'm now at the stage of tearing my hair out, burning the Power Tower and buying a shiny new G4!
Firstly, with XPostFacto, I couldn't get it to boot of my OS X (10.0 and 10.1) CD ROM (Pioneer Ultraplex40 SCSI). Since I don't have an IDE controller in my Mac (and no access to an Apple drive) I tried copying the contents of the CD to one of my spare hard disks (I have 3 in the machine: original seagate SCSI-2 2 GB, extra seagate SCSI-2 2GB, 9GB Barracuda SCSI-3 narrow). That sort of worked: I could boot off the older seagate drives but not the barracuda (this was fixed when version 2.2b7 was released with its "throttling" feature). However booting is still quite slow as it seems to take several attempts for the kernel to find the root disk image. Also while I can boot the OS X 10.0 CD image, the OS X 10.1 CD image does random things, one of the following: - get to the "Welcome" box on the OS X Installer and then freeze (or at least not let me move the mouse which makes it impossible to continue the installer - get past the "Welcome" box on the OS X Installer and get as far as picking the target disk; at that point all the disks are greyed out and cannot be selected; when I hover the mouse pointer over a disk icon, the text "-33" is displayed on the left hand side. Since I cannot select a disk, I can't continue. I can only go back. At this point, if at any time, I select something from the menus the Installer Crashes and the kernel panics. Anyway, that's the OS X 10.1 Update CD, the OS X 10.0 Install CD does let me go threw the installation process. At the end it reboots and takes me through some wizard to configure my account. At the end of that (it seems to finish ok) OS X boots up but all the applications (and dock icons) look like folders. I understand this has been a common problem with the installation not being completed (or "root" being used as the administrative account name. But I've tried installed umpteen times and got the same result. I've seen something one newsgroups about resolving this by deleting some config files, but they don't exist anywhere in my install... OS X 10.1's CD readme file claims to deal with the above problem. So since, I was unable to install it, I thought I'd try various combinations of replacing files on the OS 10.0 image with that from the OS 10.1 disc. In particular I tried replacing the installing packages with their 10.1 equivalents (and swapping mach_kernels). On each attempt the installation of files was successful but rebooting to complete configuration would invariably results in some sort of error (kernel panic, or an infinitely-rebooting sequence - depending on which files I had swapped). I have really run out of ideas for how to get OS X running on my Mac. Does anyone have any ideas??? (I once previously got the original, non-Aqua, OS X Server running on this machine back in 1999...) Also whenever I have got my Mac booting OS X (in any way) the screen appears banded. Essentially there are vertical white (or sometimes gray or black) stripes, around 50 pixels wide, going down the screen. These do not overwrite what should be on the screen, instead they push everything to the right. So, the happy/sad Mac icon appears on the far right of the screen. When text is displayed by the kernel in verbose mode, the vertical bands spread out the text, so that I can only read the left-half of the line. The problem disappears when it goes into GUI mode. Is this normal??? I have the original IXmicro Twin Turbo graphics card - I thought this was OS X compatible??? So, er... help, please! Is the Sonnet Installer likely to fare any better? I haven't tried it since it costs some money. Its not that I'm not prepared to pay for it - its just that I can't see any reason why Xpostfacto doesn't work, so I'm not sure that Sonnet will either. (And I've wasted so much time already.) All this hassle just to get a Java 2 implementation!! I really feel like getting a Windoze machine right now... -- Mustafa Arif Home page: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ma499/ Blatant plug: http://live.cgcu.net/ -- Unsupported OS X is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Unsupported OS X list info <http://lowendmac.com/lists/unsupported.html> Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive <http://www.mail-archive.com/unsupportedosx%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
