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

rjkucia

Tinkerer
Dec 21, 2021
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Madison, Wisconsin, USA
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 đźš«/"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!
 

rjkucia

Tinkerer
Dec 21, 2021
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Madison, Wisconsin, USA
Weirdly, I can't seem to find it on Garden today - maybe the page got taken down? But I was using the retail DVD.

Additionally, I resolved this issue by just reformatting the partition.
 
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retr01

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Jun 6, 2022
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@rjkucia, how did you reformat the partitions? Just a new format with different partition sizes?

And I see that the Macintosh Garden has all of the earlier versions of macOS X in retail DVDs. Is that the link you were referring to?

 

rjkucia

Tinkerer
Dec 21, 2021
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Madison, Wisconsin, USA
I kept my existing partition map, and only reformatted my Tiger partition (that was originally formatted with the OS 9 installer). The other two partitions were left alone. No idea why Tiger didn't like that partition but Sorbet Leopard was fine, but if someone was planning on trying this in the future I'd recommend formatting your OS X partitions with the OS X Disk Utility.
 
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retr01

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Yep that's the link! No idea why I couldn't find it earlier, but Garden's search functionality seems... finnicky. I used #32 on that list.

Yeah, I noticed the search engine at Machintosh Garden sometimes doesn't work correctly because some keywords do not work while others work to find what I am looking for. It could depend on the database and engine used on that site.

And that wasn't a typo! Sorbet Leopard is a modified version of Leopard: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/sorbet-leopard

Ah! :)