OSX 10.3 install on G3 Lombard succeeds once, then stops booting

[papa_november]

I have here a Powerbook G3 Lombard/Bronze keyboard that I can't for the life of me get to hold an OSX install. I can install 10.3 just fine, but after one or two reboots or cold boots, it refuses to start up - I get the "prohibited" icon screen no matter what. I can't even boot to OS9 on the neighboring partition, I can only boot to CDs. I'm using a 32GB CF card as the hard drive but that shouldn't be the issue. I did take out the top 256MB of RAM in the upper slot since the installer goes bonkers with it in, but the main problem happens whether it's installed or left out.

The PRAM and main batteries are both quite dead, but I can't imagine them causing a problem of this magnitude. What is going on?

 

[just.in.time]

Once booted back up from a CD, did you try running XPostFacto again to install all the patches and reset caches again? And fix permissions if possible. I owned a Lombard way back and it ran 10.4.x decently well through XPF.

 

[papa_november]

10.3 doesn't need XPostFacto - it's the last system that's officially supported.

I was able to mostly solve the issue - I repartitioned the drive with Drive Setup (and not Disk utility from the OSX install disc) and situated the OSX and OS9 partitions within the first 8GB of the drive. I think I did that before but this time I made the partitions 1 megabyte smaller. This time, the OSX install isn't nuking itself, so far. It still has an issue where it won't remember the startup disk and defaults to booting to the OSX partition every time, but that might be the dead PRAM battery's fault. Too bad I can't seem to find any replacement PRAM batteries anywhere online...

 

[just.in.time]

Ah, I totally forgot the Lombard had official 10.3 support, was thinking it was cut off after 10.2.8.

 

[CC_333]

Ah, I totally forgot the Lombard had official 10.3 support, was thinking it was cut off after 10.2.8.

Yep.  The Lombard can even run 10.4, but can't run an unmodified installer on it, as has an arbitrary blocklist that prevents the installer form running on machines without built-in Firewire;  The OS itself has no such block, so to work around it, one can simply install 10.4 on an officially supported machine and swap the hard drive into the Lombard.  It's quite slow, but it'll work.

c

 

[just.in.time]

@CC_333 Very cool, I wasn’t aware of that workaround to get 10.4 running on that machine.

 

[CC_333]

Neither did I, until I installed a hard drive in mine while rebuilding it, not knowing I had an install of 10.4 on it.  I was very surprised to see it boot up to 10.4 when I expected the drive to be blank!

c