I have a 300/256/6GB Blue and White G3 that I was running 10.3.8 on, and it was running fairly well, however would kernel panic maybe once a month during use for no reason. Software Update told me that I needed to update to 10.3.9, so I did, and now it kernel panics on startup, during the grey apple screen right after the circular ticker shows up. It does the same thing if I try booting off my Panther CD. Any suggestions? I've already tried CUDA reset.
Thanks
Did it kernel panic or crash *while* you were updating it?
Just curious. The same thing happened to me. I tried upgrading the RAM in my B&W a couple months ago. In doing so, I discovered that B&W are freakishly bitchy-picky about RAM. The thing started kernel panicking once in a while following the upgrade. It was pretty obvious what the problem was, but, stupidly enough, I was an idiot and let "Software Update" run while it still had the suspect memory in it. It of course panicked in the middle, and after that it would positively refuse to boot OS 10.3. Period. Even with the old known-good RAM in it. Nor would it boot off a CD. It'd start booting, and then just die. (It'd never get far enough to get into single-user or verbose boot mode.)
After this crash it *would* boot 10.2 or 9.2 install disks. Apparently the crash must of corrupted something on the hard disk partition table or file system in such a way that it'd crash 10.3's mass storage driver on any attempt to probe or mount the drive. To say the least I wasn't impressed.
Anyway. To fix things I ended up blowing away 10.3 on the screwed disk by installing 10.2 on top of it, putting a different hard disk in the system and installing 10.3 on *that*, and finally tranferring data off the corrupted drive. Good luck finding a better solution. (I'd also suggest you might want to replace your RAM. It's almost certainly the cause of your panics.)
And people wonder why I have a foul attitude about Apple products...
--Peace