Hi all,

I recently bought a new MorphOS machine - a 17” PowerBook 1.67, with 1.5 gigs RAM. Unfortunately, I have had a lot of trouble with the OS X Tiger install. Essentially, it consistently locks up the machine soon after booting. The general pattern is as follows:

1) Boot the machine to OS X
2) Click to launch an app from the dock (e.g. Safari).
3) The icon will jump up and down for an extended time, but the application won’t load.
4) This will eventually stop, but with no program loaded. If I try and click on anything else, I get the coloured whirring busy pointer, for ever. Then I have to do a forced reset.

I had this problem straight after buying the machine. I thought it might be a dodgy install, so tried to reinstall OS X tiger, but this failed during the install. Disk Utility was never able to partition or format the drive, so I gave up and bought a new 100 GB drive, which I just fitted (thinking the original drive was semi-dead and that was the cause of my issues). But now it’s displaying exactly the same behaviour on the new drive. Safe mode booting marginally improves the situation, but only marginally.

Luckily, the MorphOS install seems to be working well. I’m wondering if the version of the Tiger install DVDs it came with aren’t actually for the machine (although they are labelled PowerBook I think).

Any ideas what might be happening? I’m really keen to use the OS X side of things too if I can, to experiment with that/MacPorts etc.

Many thanks in advance

It *could* be faulty RAM. Try a memtest extensive in a MorphOS shell.

Hmm. Looking at the install DVDs which came with the machine, I can see Disk.1 is labelled “PowerBook G4 Mac OS X Install Disc 1” (serial 2Z691-5517-A) where as Disc 2 is simply labelled “Mac OS X Install Disc 2”, with serial number 2Z691-5499A). Although it successfully installed from these two discs, I wonder if they’re not actually a pair and that’s the source of the issues...

Will give that a try. I tried a full mem test with the AHT utility on the OS X install CD and it was quite happy (it look a long time to get through all 1.5 gigs I remember).

The MorphOS memtest extensive came back "Memory is ok!"

A google suggests the differing disc versions might be normal too. Hmm...at a bit of a loss!

Not sure if this is of any help. I had a G4 MDD PMac once that ran MorphOS beautifully, but wouldn't even boot OSX or run the install disc. I just ended up assuming the first CPU core was fine, but maybe something wrong with the 2nd.

Quote:

If that's the case, I could live with it. MorphOS does seem to run very nicely on it.

One thing I have noticed, is that when running the machine without the battery installed it immediately forgets the time and resets to 1900. This suggests that the internal mini cell battery is dead (I forget the name - PRAM?). I wonder if this is contributing to the OS X issues...

o test your hardware it's recommanded to download Apple Service Diagnostic CD 2.5.8.
Image can be found here: http://bruxodownloads.blogspot.com/2010/11/apple-service-diagnostic-258.html (Mirror 2 works, but you need to register). This is a .dmg image, which must burned on a CD. This CD is dualboot - you can see docs/help-files under MacOS, but to enter diagnostic-tools you have to boot from it.

If you don't can get or burn it -> give me PM!