I have a Lombard 333mhz with 320mb ram 40gb HD and cdrom. no battery. I will install a fresh copy of panther and 5 times out of 10 i will get a cirle with a line through it upon the next reboot... it also does it out of the blue sometime after its been used for weeks flawlessly then does it, most of the time forces me to re install OSX all over again, i have no clue whats going wrong as it doesnt do it all the time but enough for me to notice it now and its really making me mad. it takes long enough to install panther on this as it is, let alone having to do it twice.
also i had a pc card 802.11g from linksys that worked great for weeks, then just doesnt show up anymore. what gives??
Sounds like a flaky motherboard.
I had a similar problem with my lombard. The OS kept corrupting itself, and re-installing OSX would result in a "Installation Failed" dialog. Turns out that my RAM had gone bad. Try swapping in known-good SODIMMs.
heh, the HD is bad....
The Lombard's were notorious for the L2 cache going bad. The only solution (if this is the case) is to replace the processor daughter card with one that has a known good L2 cache.
We've got two or three Lombard's here that can't handle OS X due to the bad L2. They run OS 9 pretty solidly, though.
That happened to my snow iBook at one point when one of my RAM cards went bad. When something went wrong with Tiger, it was the Finder folder with the question mark, but the Ø showed up with the RAM... might want to test it, maybe?
Just a guess.