TOTALLY screwed! Please help!

Hi all. I am caught between a rock and a hard place and really need some assistance.

First off, I'm on a PowerMac G4 Sawtooth, with an upgraded 1.4ghz processor, and 80 gig SCSI u160.

Recently my Mac started acting funny. It all of the sudden didn't recognize the SCSI drive. And it would not let me save items to the desktop. Any time I tried to save anything to the desktop, it would tell me "you do not have permission to modify the desktop", or something to that effect. Bizzarre. So no big deal, I figured I'd just wipe the computer clean and reinstall the OS (I do this once in a while anyway).

Well, now I'm stuck. When I try to install OS X (10.3), the installation will freeze up during "Installing Asian Language blah blah blah". I have TWO seperate sets of OS X discs, and BOTH of them freeze up during the Asian Language part (though at different percentages).

It won't let me boot from an OS 9 cd, so I can't install 9 first and then 10. I tried installing 10.0, and it tells me "there were errors installing the software". I don't have 10.1 or 10.2, so these are also not options.

So I'm totally screwed! I can't get anything to work! I have no idea what I'm supposed to do at this point. Can anyone out there please help or make some suggestions? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much.

CGI Guy

hmmm sounds like it could be the hard drive or the logic board, can you try and boot from and extrernal drive?

I would suspect the problem may be your SCSI card (What kind is it?). Although most of the SCSI issues were fixed by 10.3, there were a few still floating around, and what you describe is nearly exactly what I saw when I tried to boot from the OSX 10.1 and 10.2 CDs with a SCSI card in my Sawtooth machine. You may want to try slapping an IDE drive in the machine (the internal drives on the Sawtooths were all IDE) and trying that route. Also, you may want to do a custom install and skip all of the extra languages etc.