01-06-2010, 11:53 AM

Hi

My brother is trying to install MacOS X Leopard on an iMac (USB 2.0), which is the last generation of iMac's that looked like a white bowl upside down with an LCD monitor on top: iMac G4/1.0 15-Inch "FP" (USB 2.0) Specs (iMac USB 2.0, M9285LL/A, N/A, PowerMac6,1) @ EveryMac.com

The machine is bought used, and currently has MacOS X 10.2.8 installed. The Leopard DVD is (as far as I know) the standard retail version. The DVD was not shipped with a different machine, but bought separately. We have upgraded the machine to 1,5 GB RAM, which the machine correctly recognize, and the current MacOS installation works fine. There is only one partition, which works fine.

He tells me that the DVD took a long time to load when he inserted it. He clicked the standard installation logo, and let the machine reboot to start the installation. He told me that he came to the usual grey screen with the apple logo, and rotating wheel. Then he let it stand for about 1,5 hours(!) before the "Welcome to MacOS X Leopard installation" window appeared. When he gets to the stage when he's supposed to select a volume to install it onto, no volumes appear. When he goes into the disk utilities (via the Apple-menu), they can't recognize any HD volumes either.

Searches on the net reveals that Leopard is on a dual layer DVD, an some people claim it can't be installed on machines that don't have dual layer DVD drives, but many others say it should work fine, and that they have done it themselves, without problems.

After resetting the P-RAM, the machine boots nicely into 10.2.8, and everything seems fine. He says the DVD station made some mechanical clicking sounds which sounded suspicious. There were minor scratches on the DVD, but much less than what usually causes trouble.

I'm going there tomorrow to help him. Do any of you have any ideas?!

EDIT: Yes, it's Leopard, not Snow Leopard.

01-06-2010, 01:43 PM

Having very similar problem...see same issue I posted today. The HD seems non-existant.

01-06-2010, 03:50 PM

Suggest try booting from the Leopard disc, go into Utilities in the menu bar, and run Repair Disk and see what is reported. If all goes well erase the drive and format Mac OS Extended ) Journalled) and go back to the Installer and see if it installs.

Sounds like you have a failing hard drive.

01-11-2010, 06:05 AM

I couldn't do that, because the disk repair program wasn't able to see the HD at all when booted from the Leopard disc. I evetually found the solution: I brought along my macbook, booted it into FireWire target disk mode, had it connected to the iMac through a FireWire cable, and then my macbook worked like an external DVD drive, which I could install from. Apparently the only problem was that the iMac couldn't properly read from the DVD.

Here is info about FireWire target disk mode:
How to use and troubleshoot FireWire target disk mode