Failing to boot OS X 10.2 CD

I have a retail Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar CD I'm trying to boot on an 800 MHz iMac G4, with no success so far.

Booting by the "C" key does not work.

Booting using the Option key does not work either.

I went to my last resort, using the "boot" command in OpenFirmware, which also, does not work. (Can someone tell me what I did wrong?)



HOW DO I GET THIS DANG THING TO BOOT?!

Thanks in advance.

The 10.2 Jaguar CD is a Retail one and not one that came with another Mac? Is the surface dirty or with fingerprints?

Only other thing I can think of is the Optical drive is either dirty or faulty. That is a quite old machine so it would be the later.

Is there an OS on the hard drive? If so, can you boot from it and read any CD/DVD in the drive??

dtravis7 said:

The 10.2 Jaguar CD is a Retail one and not one that came with another Mac? Is the surface dirty or with fingerprints?

Only other thing I can think of is the Optical drive is either dirty or faulty. That is a quite old machine so it would be the later.

Is there an OS on the hard drive? If so, can you boot from it and read any CD/DVD in the drive??

Click to expand...

Yes, it is a retail CD, and it is clean. There was OS X Tiger on it before, and it had no problems reading CD's and DVD's. Currently there is no OS on the hard drive.

I just read that it's not possible to install any OS older than the one that was on it when it left the factory.

Apparently, this iMac only supports Panther and Tiger. (I think it might be one of those OS X-only models, that's not to say Jaguar isn't OS X, but it's an older OS, more around the OS 9 era.)

It's a shame. I love Jaguar.

Ah that makes total sense. I should have caught that my self but on the older Macs sometimes I forget just which version of OSX they shipped with.

That is right, an older version than what came with it will not work.

Jaguar was excellent for it's time but you would find that no newer software will run. Safari is so old many sites will not even load and finding an old Firefox for Jag is a Pain. You are much better off with especially Tiger.