PowerMac G4 (Sawtooth) Driving Me to Drink

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I have a recently acquired Sawtooth G4. Until I decided to reload OS X, it was working fine with OS X Tiger. However, I've been trying all day to get a working reload of Tiger installed on it, with no luck.

As I bought it, it had two hard drives installed, neither of them original: a 40GB Western Digital (configured as a slave) and a 250GB WD (master). The OS was installed on the 250GB.

First challenge was that my OS X CD wouldn't boot off the installed DVD RAM drive. So I replaced that with a new LITE-ON DVD-RW. That seemed to work fine, and I was able to read the install disk. However, I could not by any means get it to boot off the install DVD--when I rebooted and held the "C" key, it ignored it. When I tried to boot in single user mode (CMD-OPT-S) I got a blank screen. When I tried to get into openboot (OPT) I got nothing.

Finally, I took the 250G hard drive out and was able to get it to boot to the CD that way. However, when I installed to the 40G drive, it refused to boot from it (and still refuses to do so). I've now tried 3 separate installs on that drive: 10.4 client, 10.4 server, and 10.3 client, and they all install fine, but won't boot.

Finally, in desparation, I wiped out the 250GB hd on a windows box (reformatted it) and put it back in, intending to try to do a fresh install to it. The install started normally, however within seconds it displayed a message indicating that there had been an error in the install and requiring me to restart. When I restarted, the system no longer recognized the hard drive.

I've now tried 4 different hard drives, with a variety of different results. Only the 40GB drive appears to work at all in the machine, but the machine won't boot off it. Other drives work once--until I try to format them--then they stop working. If I put them in a Windows box after that, they seem fine I can format them etc. I've reset the pram, reset the PMU, and checked the battery, and oh yeah I replaced the IDE cable. I've also tried every combination of master, slave, cable select, etc. that I can think of.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions for what I can do next? I'm completely stumped at this point.

Thanks,

Amp
 

dtravis7


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First thing, is this for sure a Sawtooth? What are the basic specs?

How are you jumpering the hard drives? Cable Select seems to work better on some older Macs at least with the ones I have worked with.

Also if the Sawtooth (and any older G4 up to the Quicksilver 2002) is stock without an aftermarket PCI Hard Drive card, the Sawtooth can only recognize 128GB of that 250GB drive.
 
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Is the Tiger install DVD the black full retail install version and NOT a grey coloured model specific disc? The drive needs to be formatted Mac OS Extended.
 
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I had similar problems with a G3 Blue and white, and if you do have a Sawtooth you have a very similar logic board, just with some modifications. Anyways I could not get it too install on any drives, the installer would always hang, and when I installed a system from another computer and moved it into the powermac it wouldn't boot. I traced the problem back to bad ram, removing one bad stick completely solved the problem. Also make you can move around the jumpers, I found with some drives, just putting everything on cable select worked out well. Just a thought if all else fails.
 
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Got it

Turns out that the trick was to go into disk utility and manually format the 250GB disk down to 128GB. Then it installed correctly. I never did get the 40GB disk to work, but at this point I just want to be done with this thing.

Thanks for all the responses!
 

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