[G4] My huge problems in upgrading to Panther

[Tracker at aol.com]

Today, I did the upgrade to Panther on my Lombard laptop. When I started the 
installation, I was unable to get my Lombard to start up from the Panther CD 
no matter what I tried.

After the fourth attempt to start from the CD, I realized that I still had 
the replacement CDRW/DVD drive inserted in the bay. I removed it and inserted 
the original CD reader that came with the Lombard. 

The Panther installation went without a hitch except when it wanted to 
connect to the internet to register the installation. I did not have a physical 
connection hooked up, so I simply hit the "Continue" button and finished the 
installation.

After the installation, I shut down and installed a new 128Mb RAM chip to 
bring the laptop up to 256Mb. So far, I have reconfirmed all my preference 
settings and everything seems to be working properly.

There are some visual differences to get used to and I think that the laptop 
starts up quicker now than with Jaguar. It certainly shuts down much quicker, 
only a couple of revolutions of the gear wheel instead of 9 or 10 as before.

With the ease of installation (once I put in a bootable CD drive) that I 
experienced, I would suggest that you consider that there might have been a 
problem that you created when you did the clean installation of Jaguar and then did 
an "Archive" installation of Panther.

The "shade that comes down the computer screen with a message to restart" 
indicates a kernel panic. Try to reboot and check whether that is repeated. If it 
isn't repeated, then try to run some programs to check the performance of 
your machine.

If it still goes into panic mode, try booting to the install CD and run Disk 
Utility to repair your hard drive (if possible).

After that, I am out of suggestions because of my own novice standing with 
OS-X. Good luck.