Has any one had any success installing this on a Rev A iMac?
My Bondi baby is mis behaving and does not like X (any release really). I wanted to try the XPostFacto route, but the installer tells me it will not work with my type of machine.
Machine is:
Rev A iMac - stock 233 CPU - 120GB HD (boots off 7.5 partition) - 512MB -6MB video - 24x CD RW currenlty running OS 9.2.2 (stablely)
--DDTM
That are you hoping to solve with XpostFacto?
Just an educated guess... are you getting that condition where the OS X installer doesn't see any drives to install on, even though you're *sure* you have a partition under the 8GB mark that it *should* see? If that's the case, well... do the following, in order:
1: Blow away all your partitions, and try recreating them with the OS X disk utility. This has worked for me, like, once.
2: Try a different hard disk. Don't ask me why, but in my experience some brands/individual disks work with OS X, some don't. They all work with OS 9, of course.
3: Slaughter a chicken, douse a midget's hat in the leftovers, drop a poisonous snake into Roger Moore's bathwater, and burn a few candles. You never know, it might help.
4: Toss the iMac out of a rapidly moving vehicle, and go on with your life.
--Peace
Regardless of how many options I select or deselect, once the install begins, near the end of the process, the screen goes black, the power button goes yellow, and nothing changes from this point on (have let it sit for hours to a day). I do not want to have to pull RAM to make this work (something I have heard about). I will try to set some nvram parameters to make this work if I get to that point.
1. & 2. Partitions are good, I somehow had gotten an install of X.2.8 working in the past on this very partition. I had to purge it due to a special need (next time I'll just buy a clean drive vice trying to 'rebuild' things later). The partition was created with the X base release CD.
3. Can I, or should I, eat the chicken, the midget, the hat, or the Roger Moore? (and is it okay to use Ranch Dressing?)
4. My single-minded determination will not allow me to do anything other than pump money into this machine with the supreme goal of making it the sweetest little Bondi that could. I will not tell him you have said such hurtful things about him, lest he become depressed and feel that you were trying to invalidate his feelings.
--DDTM
Ah.
Random thought: See about disabling power saving on the machine before starting the install. That's probably not it, but you can try.
Is it always *exactly* the same point? (Even if you sit there and poke the mouse once and a while, to make *sure* it's not going to sleep?)
It's not *that* hard to get the RAM in and out. If you have any other SO-DIMMs it's worth trying a different set, or only using one. If you have a bad chip you have a bad chip, and temporarily disabling it just to get past the install isn't going to net you anything. It'll happily crash and randomly hang *after* you've installed OS X, and that'll be just as irritating, trust me.
I went through utter hell with a batch of new 15" Powerbooks recently, troubleshooting RAM allergies. I've had machines that have successfully passed the hardware diagnostics RAM test start screwing up once they've been imaged and actually have to start, you know, booting and running. Of course, in every case the RAM they hate works perfectly fine in the Dell machines...
There's a special place in hell reserved for the morons in the computer industry who decided that "ECC" was a "server" feature that desktop machines didn't need. Once RAM sizes started getting over a few megabytes it should of been considered mandatory.
Feh. The only good Bondi is a dead Bondi. Luckily their penchant for random self-destruction means that there's more good ones every day. ;^>
--Peace
I have installed MacOS X 10.3 Panther on such a machine.
No need for XPost Facto at all. But there were some problems.
For some reason I had to prepare the disk with the disk utility from MacOS 9. I was even forced to first take the disk out and "destroy" it by NTFS formatting it on a PC first. Apparently some sticky info remained on the disk even when formatted on the Mac? I don't know.
The boot partition had to be something like 7.3 or 7.5 GB, even though the drive itself was 10GB.
This is some hardware limitation on that model, a stupid bug. There's no way around it. You could of course create another separate partition dedicated to SWAP. Also, there are ways to migrate most of the OS and application data to another partition.
But I never did any of that. The machine contains just Toast, MS Office and whatever software that came with the OS. And a screensaver with the Spiderman 2 theme. OSX behave very good, updates via Internet are no problem.
Hope this gave you some ideas.
Regards, Dick
xPostFacto is for beige and older macs. An iMac has everything needed to run 10.3, I have installed it on them with no problems before. The ram takes no time at all to take out. You would only need to pull the top chip. Should be a 10 minute job, 20 if you have never done it before. And as stated above, make 100% sure that boot partition is on the first part of the disc, not the 2nd.
Do not get me wrong, I have had X.2.8 on this machine before, I just have had some problems with my latest reinstall to fix a persistent error. I was hoping to re-enable my iMac floppy hack as a by-product of X-Post Facto as well as address some specific errors I was experiencing that it seemed Post Facto could help with. The problem was just that it did not like going on to my iMac and I knew so little about this tool. I finally came to the conclusion that the machine works best under Classic and have rebuilt it as such.
--DDTM
There are no drivers for the built in floppy drive under OSX. I believe there was some kind of petition to the developers about that, but nothing happened. There should be a driver from the Darwin project though.
The Panther OS works nice on the Bondi Blue, but is a bit slow.
The machine is easily upgradable to 266MHz, by removing a jumper and then resoldering it in a different location on the processor board. You need very good eyesight, or a magnifying glass with good lighting. The jumper is in the form of a zero ohm resistor, measuring only 1*2mm. Don't try doing this unless you're a skilled solderer.
I have the different configs I could try with moving the jumpers, but opted not to do that since I am still toying with the idea of a Sonnet upgrade card (iHarmoni). My main interest in the mother board floppy was being able to boot off it. I did the hack when it first hit the net. Some six moths later, int the midst of screwing around, I hosed the whole machine and could not boot from the HD or CD. So I cracked open the case and plugged in my floppy and booted and was able to restore some changes to the original state.
One of the hacks I have in the planning stages is a major case mod to the iMac, adding a second IDE hard drive and a floppy to the case while keeping the appearance stock (just need to gather up the cash to get the needed parts for the screen mod). Getting the floppy to work requires an OS mod if I go above 8.5, hence part of my interest in Post Facto. The final stage of the mod will be the CPU upgrade.
Where can I get the latest on the Darwin project and the floppy driver you refered to?
--DDTM
(sing "Subject" to tune of "Shake yer booty!")
Yes! Add more power consumers to your rev A iMac and hasten its demise! The PS is already weak and snotless, dump on more and end its already pathetic lfe sooner than later!
dan k
I though about the PS, and I have a PS hack planned AND a spare on hand just in case it dies and my hack don't work. This machine will live forever, no matter how much money I have to put into it (and so far the only real money was for the 512M RAM, the 120G HD, and the CD-RW).
--DDTM
Just move the mouse around every few minutes during the install.
OS X will run fine; I have it running on my Rev. B iMac, and it's great.