[G4] Flatliner MDD

[Richard H.Blount]

Update:
I..uh..found.. an iso image of 10.4 Tiger that fails during the DVD
verification process (prior to installation to the hard drive(s). It
recognized that I have 3 drives installed and two DVD drives and all the
memory. Just fails on install, probably because it is a bootleg. I feel much
more confident that I correctly assembled the machine, which is running
Ubuntu Linux quite well thank you very much. Unfortunately, this will put me
way back on the learning curve again learning yet another OS. Not that that
is a bad thing. I think I can make this machine dual boot so I can practice
with Linux while luxuriating with a familiar and stable OS. In my studies, I
saw several references that Tiger is somewhat less stable than Panther. Is
this you guys' experience? I searched eBay for Panther and it seems every
one out there is from a powerbook restore set and not the non-system
specific retail version. Will these work?

Rich


I was able to
initialize the new drive and even installed Osx to the drive using my
install disks on the older machine (Also a G4). I took the disk with a
freshly installed OS from the old machine, put it in the Newer one and it
did not recognize it then either.

Apparently the system restore/install disks are not entirely compatible with
the unit. This was determined when I was able to install a Linux
distribution to it and that OS was able to at least recognize drives of all
kinds on both Hard drive busses, and intermittently boot from both ATA
busses.  The maddening part of troubleshooting this problem was that it
doesn't die at the same time every time or even act the same way every time.
It starts and runs consistently using a very old drive on the 66 using a
distribution of Linux for PPC. This would be great if I knew anything about
Linux other than putting in the disk, holding C and letting it do it's
stuff. 

A couple of guys have generously offered to send me copies of the correct
hardware test and restore disks. I really appreciate that and have put the
machine aside awaiting their arrival.