Tonight I finally booted 10.3.1 from a Firewire drive. It was real hard, and I have no idea why it decided to boot. My 7500/G4 is a complicated monster with four 4GB SCSI drives, and now a 120GB Firewire that partitioned too many ways (9 partitions-five 20GB, 4-3.75GB, which I may change).
Here's the scoop. XPF 3 is really still 'alpha' and I probably jumped the gun. My 'main' drive was only 4 GB and was so screwed up by 10.2.8, and then a 10.2.6 archive reinstall that I felt that pressing onward to 10.3 couldn't be worse. It nearly was.
I used the 'upgrade' option to install 10.3 over my 10.2.6 System on a 4 GB drive using XPF 3.0a8. No problems, installed fine, rebooted fine. Ran a week or so, and then upgraded to 10.3.1 (perhaps a mistake, it's a 'tiny' upgrade, and will disable your ability to rerun the 'upgrade' installation, forcing an 'archive' which would be problematic on a small drive. Soon after the upgrade, I starting getting some freezes like the 10.2.8 caused. I'd also read about 10.3 requiring some giant amount of free drive space, and knew my nearly full 4 GB was too tight to continue. I needed the clone to the Firewire just for the breathing room.
XPF 3 is supposed to launch in both OS 9 & X. In my admittedly 'minimal' experience, I could only get Firewire drives to boot from the OS X side, and always had a panic when attempting to boot from the OS 9 side. This is really a big problem because I can only get XPF 3.0a3 to launch in OS X, and it doesn't support 10.3. When versions 3.0a4 thru 3.0a8 are launched in OS X, nothing happens. I used Activity Monitor while launching and nothing shows. As I went back to 3.0a3 which would launch, it popped into Activity Monitor and then turned RED and said "xPostFacto hung" while the password authorization was waiting for my entry. Upon entering the password, it "disappeared" from Activity Monitor and no XPF activity was reported, which seems bizarre since this was on the 'working' boot.
The verbose startup was ugly. I've been reading all the verbose boot dialog for several years and this startup had things I've never seen. Lots of SCSI problems. MESH-can't allocate 'something" over & over. LOTS & LOTS of dialog, twice or 3x more than usual. I had almost zero confidence it wouldn't panic since I'd run every boot combination possible from the OS 9 side using 3.0a8, and all ended in panic. Since I was only in 3.0a3 and unlike XPF 2.x; XPF 3.x reloads the Extensions EVERY run, so I thought the Panther incompatible 3.0a3 Extensions would replace the working 3.0a8 versions and cause panic. Surprise! No Panic! Here I am. I ran xBench, and my score increased nearly 50% from around 26 to around 38. Panther is now the first OS X I've used that feels really quick like OS 9. Unfortunately, the toll of all the trouble seems large. I'm hanging on by a thread for a better version of XPF. I'm not shutting down until newer version because I doubt I'll get restarted. Twenty panic starts make you gun shy. Kris Tilford
My System: 7500 XLR8 G4/400 544MB OS 10.3.1 Four 4GB 7,200rpm SCSI narrow Firewire Maxtor 120GB DiamondMax+ 7,200rpm Radeon7000 64MB
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