iMac G4 Error

Hey guys,

Well my G4 came in the mail and I was happily checking it out when I decided to throw in the Panther Installation discs and do a clean install. Here's what happened when I started it up:



Any suggestions?

Cheers!

N.B. Also, with this situation in mind, is there a way I can MANUALLY open the CD drive without doing significant damage to it? I'm thinking once I get that Panther disc out it'll work just fine. How would I do so?

UPDATE: I just held down the reset button whilst holding down the mouse button and it force opened the CD drive. Yay! Now all I need to do is figure out how I clean install it...without the above occurring! Any ideas?

Does the machine boot from the install DVD/CD by inserting disc, and holding down 'c' after hitting the chime sounds? If so then go to Utilities>Disk Utility>Repair Disk and if is well, arstt to install Panther.

The disc are black coloured full retail install and not grey model specific disks by chance?

harryb2448 said:

and not grey model specific disks by chance

Click to expand...

Ah! That's the problem right there. I was using the grey discs that came with my current Intel Aluminum iMac, so that was causing the error I think!

Thanks for your help

That wouldn't be Panther then, it would be either Tiger or Leopard. Many people make the mistake of thinking that the system restore disks are interchangeable between different models, but they are not. Did the computer come with restore disks? If not you will have to buy some. For that system I would recommend picking up a copy of 10.4 Tiger, which can be found on ebay for cheap. Make sure it is the black retail copy, and not the gray restore disks. Tiger still supports most software, while Panther (10.3) is quite outdated at this point, and doesn't support most modern applications. The 800 Mhz iMac does not meet the minimum requirements for Leopard, which is the most recent version of OS X.

You got it. For the G4 suggest looking for say Tiger OS X.4, making sure it is the black retail install DVD. You sure need your own install discs for troubleshooting, repairing disk etc. Also you do not advise memory - suggest at least 1GB.

Don't know about cheap as Tiger still brings up to $100.00 second hand!