RakaDisciple

Well just like the title says. I have an old iBook clamshell and I installed Panther 10.3 on it to replace 9.2 that it had been running. Beleive it or not that actually went fine. The problem came when i installed the big combo update to go from 10.3 to like 10.38 or something. after installing that big update and i tried to start it up, It loads like everything is fine until just before the blue bar is full and it sits at "Waiting for Auto directory binding" I have let it sit for about an hour and it never gets passed. I have tried booting in safe mode and it does the same thing. I have run fsck and it said the drive was ok on the first try. I have my panther disk and It wont boot from it when i hold "C" it just gets to the gray screen with the apple and stays there instead. I have tried holding "Option" and it does not appear there, just the HD. So... yea. If you can think of anything else i can do. I am willing to do a clean install and erase everything just to have it work again. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated though because I cannot use it at all the way it is and I know its not great but I dont have another laptop.

sinclair_tm

Could be the CD drive has gone bad, if it won't boot from the CD, or see it in the boot menu. Odd that the update killed the iBook. Do you still have the OS 9 CDs?

RakaDisciple

no i dont have any cds other than the OS X cds. I actually talked to one of my IT teachers at school and he thought maybe my hard drive was full. also he suggested that maybe i should put the cd image onto a flash drive and see if i can boot the image from that single partition. if i can find my flash drive im going to try that.

sinclair_tm

That iBook can't boor from USB. A full hard drive would not keep it from booting from CD. I've booted many a Mac from a CD/DVD that had no hard drive at all. The only thing I can think of is that there may of been some firmware update that it didn't get for OS X because they can only be installed from OS 9, but I think they were all needed to run 10.3 in the first place. I'm thinking that you had a hardware failure that happened at the same time as the update. If it had Firewire ports, I'd say put it in target disk mode, but I don't think all the clam shell iBooks had Firewire ports.

RakaDisciple

Ok. So its ruined? And a little update. It no longer gets to the loading window it now hangs on the gray apple screen with no indication of moving at all...

RakaDisciple

Hmm another interesting update. So i tried to load it from the cd again. And for some reason it did something... but not really what i need. the cd drive made alot of noise then it took me to the white open firmware screen and it said Default Catch code=300 and all this. Well then it says type "mac-boot" to boot or "shut-down" to shut down. Well so i typed mac-boot and the cd makes alot more noise but it shows the folder with the finder face and then it becomes a question mark. I let it go for quite a while like that but it sounds like the CD is restarting rather than doing something and the folder just keeps doing that face/question mark bit.

RakaDisciple

Well. It would seem that my Install CD was the problem. I was looking around online and someone said that it would send me to the OF screen if the disc was bad, so i got my hands on another one and even tho it took a really long time I have it installing now. still 2 hours and some change left but at least it appears to be working. After this ill have to decide what to do now. The whole problem started when i used the combo update to go all the way from 10.3 to 10.3.9. But i had to use it in order to get quicktime 7 and i had to do THAT so i could get VLC and watch .Avi videos which is all i wanted to do with this thing in the first place... So yea well see ill have to think about it. Unless anyone knows another way to watch Avi in 10.3 (Besides converting them) plz dont close the thread quite yet. Ill post back when its finished installing and well see if it worked for sure. Thanks.

P.S. U were right the HD wasnt full it still had 3 gb left on it when i began this clean install. O i almost forgot! I was thinking about it and could it be not booting BECAUSE it cant hold like any PRAM. This computer has no battery you see, so when it gets unplugged from the wall everything resets. When i used to boot up before it would say that its 1904... But so i was wondering if it was just because i unplugged it. I checked to make sure 10.3 was working before the update but i dont know if i unplugged it at any point during the trials.

sinclair_tm

As long as the iBook is off, unplugging it shouldn't hurt anything, just cause it to complain a lot, like you have seen, about the date. I'd make sure that you always leave at least 2gig free on the hard drive at all times. The OS will need it to run well. As for the update, did you download the combo update from Apple's support site, or did you let Software Update get it? Also, I think you may find that the G3 isn't the best for watching video on. I have come across some that really bog my 1.467Ghz G4 down, and that is in VLC, which does a better job at playing them than Quicktime.

RakaDisciple

Yea well it installed fine and its running Mac Os 10.3 now. Im not gonna try the update again cuz now im all gunshy. But i did do a third party installer combo update that i got from apple.com because I cant put this little guy on the net. As for the video thing i guess its ok that it cant play videos cuz my girlfriend (Who actually owns the computer) and i were just going to use it to watch movies together, but umm... well we sorta broke up yesterday lol. I guess ill give it back to her but its kinda funny that i spent all this time on it and now I wont even see it again. But hey... thats just how the world works sometimes. Oh well it was good practice and i learned about about macs. Thanks alot Mr.Sinclair :)