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Tiger Installed, but Won't Boot on 12" PB G4

rjkucia

Well-known member
I've installed Tiger onto my 12" 867MHz PowerBook G4 using the Garden image, and it seemed to install correctly. However, when I try to boot from that drive, it tries to boot for a little bit, until I'm greeted with a disappointing grey šŸš«/"not" sign.

I tried verbose boot, and got an error message that started with " boot waiting on <dict ID="0">...", similar to this:


When I googled the error, everything I found was specifically for Hackintoshes, which was strange.


Here's my setup:
  • 12" 867MHz PowerBook G4, 1.25GB memory
  • 256GB SSD in three partitions, formatted during the installation of OS 9:
    • 20GB Mac OS 9 (OS 9 Lives edition, since this model doesn't officially support 9)
    • 50GB Sorbet Leopard (copied from the original HDD, which the previous owner installed)
    • 70GB Tiger
    • Remaining space is empty/unpartitioned, which I didn't realize at first, but I figure is due to OS 9's HDD limit

I'm planning on re-formatting the Tiger partition using OS X disk utility and doing a full reinstall there to see if that works, but since that'll take a while, I wanted to see if anyone else has seen this before or has an idea of what I might be doing wrong. Thanks!
 

Juror22

Well-known member
Nice to see that worked! Thanks for posting your setup, so that someday when I get round to updating mine, I can move to a solid state drive and know what works.
 

rjkucia

Well-known member
Nice to see that worked! Thanks for posting your setup, so that someday when I get round to updating mine, I can move to a solid state drive and know what works.
The main thing I would recommend is planning out your partitions ahead of time - one of either APM/HFS+/Disk Utility doesn't support modifying partitions without wiping the drive, and since I made the partitions initially in OS 9, I'm stuck with about 80GB of unused space that OS 9 couldn't see.

I'll try third-party partitioning tools at some point, although there's not too much of a reason to since I probably won't need that extra storage any time soon anyways.
 

rjkucia

Well-known member
How early? I was using Tiger's Disk Utility, and it told me I can't modify the partition table without deleting all the data on all my partitions. This may be an OS 9 driver thing, though.
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
Oh I see what you are saying, I misread what you wrote. Thereā€™s nothing I know of that can do that, as the info as to where each partition exists would be destroyed.
 

Corgi

Well-known member
Leopard's Disk Utility is much better at non-destructive partition resizing and manipulation, and it should just run on the 867MHz PBG4. To be honest though, I think you'd be better off making a "Data" partition in the unused space to share between OSes.
 

rjkucia

Well-known member
Leopard does seem like it should work, but when I try to resize any partitions in it I get the error message "MediaKit reports partition (map) too small". If I just try to add a partition in the empty space, I get "Filesystem resize support required, such as HFS+ with Journaling enabled", which is likely referring to the OS 9 partition (standard HFS+)
 

Corgi

Well-known member
That's really weird. It sounds like maybe the map itself may be wrong because of the size of the disk vs the max capacity of the tool used to make it. You might be able to use something like parted on a PPC Linux disc to fix it, but that would be going towards the "Danger, Will Robinson!" end of the data preservation spectrum.
 

rjkucia

Well-known member
Ah yeah, that would make sense since the OS 9 Disk Utility thought there was only 190GB or whatever on the disk. I guess that's the lesson here, lol
 
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