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
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