I just bought Panther off of my friend for my iMac, and installing it went very niceley. Then I thought I could reformat my iBook, since it has gotten pretty sluggish. But when I put in the first disk and restarted, the grey Apple bootscreen was screwed up. The apple was a little to the right, cutting off the lower little thing sticking out of the bite, and apearing on the left just hanging there. And next to the leaf there was a scary looking little line of black and white dots. Then after a minute the cd stopped spinning and nothing was happening. So I had to shut it down by holding the power button and then eject the cd before it booted off it again. The normal OS loaded normally.
Now, I am thinking there are some possibilites. 1 is that it could be the screen spanner that is making it mad, so should I unplug my external monitor to disable this or does it need to be removed? Or it could also be the RAM that is in my iBook. I may need to take it out to install. But if you guys ever had this problem and know what to do, it would be appreciated. I can give more info if needed. This is an iBook G4 1.33 14"

Is this a retail version of panther?

I would def try removing the screen first. But I am not sure this will correct the problem since the disk quit spinning and nothing happened...

I would try another copy of OS X as well and test a few other things. It sounds like a game of trial and error to me, but I would start with those two.

Yes. it is the retail. And I tried both of my theories and they both failed And I don't know anyone else around here that has any OS X disks, unless the elementary school by my house has any (the whole school is covered in Macs :woohoo: ) But I doubt they'd let me

Your iBook shipped with 10.3.5. If your install disc is a retail, its probably 10.3. It should be written on the disk. (If not, boot from HD, put the disc in and open up the startup disk prefs.)

Macs will not boot from an OS which is older than they are.

Well, my iMac that I used the disks on had 10.3.9 on it...but it DID have 9 on it when I got it, so that kind of rules that out :blink:

have you tried resetting your p-ram?

iProd wrote:


I assume you are referring to the Macs listed on your sig.
The last of the G3 iMacs shipped with OS 9.1 and !0.0.4. (10.3.9 was obviously an upgrade.) Anything older will either refuse to boot, or refuse to install. Anything newer will run them fine.
Your iBook 1.33GHz shipped from the factory with 10.3.5 on it. Anything older than 10.3.5 will not have the required extensions to run the hardware in this iBook and will not even boot. Any later retail disc will have them included and will boot fine. This is why you sometimes cannot boot Macs from discs which shipped other Macs. PowerBook install CDs do not always have all the extensions to run a PowerMac or iMac. PowerBook discs sometimes work on ibooks and vice versa. Probably also true of certain PowerMac/iMac combinations. It varies from disc to disc. Thats why Shadow asked if the disc was a retail copy.

Bottom line is this: Look at your Panther install CD. If the version is lower than 10.3.5, it will not even boot a G4 1.33GHz iBook.

You might be able to install it via firewire target mode, but again you will need to download the combo updater and take it over 10.3.5 before it will boot. And you may find this won't work unless you run the installer from another iBook. It may not install the necessary iBook extensions if you run the installer from an iMac G3.

Thanks for the good explanation...helped me out a lot But right at this moment I am at the Apple store getting Tiger, so no worries...thanks a lot.:woohoo: