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Cant update 10.2 on PPC G4 after reinstall

S

ShadetreeSpecialist

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 3, 2022
11
6
A few weeks ago my PPC G4 stopped booting due to a hard drive issue. I had to remove one of two HD's and repartition the remaining one, make it the Master & reinstall OSX 10.2 from a CD (gray disc, not fuzzy X). Since then I've been stuck since Apple ended support for these OS's... My USB external drives no longer show up now, whether its a Toshiba SSD or a thumb drive. Also no Firewire devices are reading. None are visible/mountable in Disk Utility.

I did the software reinstall cd too but it seems like I'm missing drivers. This machine used to have 10.4.11 on it but I can't find a way to get it back to useable again. I've been downloading installers for 10.2.4 as I read you have to update to that before you can go up to 10.2.8 and then who flipping knows beyond that lol. I've downloaded multiple updaters for multiple versions of 10.2 from multiple sites including the Combo Updater thats supposed to be stand-alone..... Burning these as bootable images using TransMac or PowerISO but so far I've burned 12 CD's and not a single one opens on my G4. It will either eject the CD and show no prompts or it will say the disc is blank. Attempting to boot from them doesn't work and booting with the option key only shows my boot drive. The CD drive does work as thats how I got the software update done.

I've been browsing forums for a few weeks now trying to find a solution but I'm beyond tired and frustrated and seemingly out of options. Any help would be greatly appreciated, without this G4 recognizing USB drives it's crippling my business as I need the G4 to act as a bridge between my windows machines and an old G3 that runs a Vinyl cutter.

Model: Power PC G4 version 2.1 933 Mhz (Quicksilver I think)
1.25Gb RAM
 
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Amethyst1 said:
The 10.2.8 Combo update should get you started. It’s not necessary to burn that as a bootable CD. Try burning it “normally” as a data CD.

But I’d suggest downloading a Tiger 10.4.6 DVD image from Macintosh Garden, burning that to a DVD and trying to get 10.4.6 running, which you should then be able to update to 10.4.11 using the respective Combo update.
Click to expand...
I'll try burning it now....I'm using a Windows PC for this though which is why I was thinking I needed to burn the image with TransMac or something
 
ShadetreeSpecialist said:
I'll try burning it now....I'm using a Windows PC for this though which is why I was thinking I needed to burn the image with TransMac or something
Click to expand...
The 10.2.8 Combo updater is a disk image. Nonetheless, it should be burned as a normal file and then opened on the Mac.
 
Amethyst1 said:
The 10.2.8 Combo updater is a disk image. Nonetheless, it should be burned as a normal file and then opened on the Mac.
Click to expand...
okay I burned the file to a CD in my Windows PC & closed the session and when I put it in the G4 it says it's a blank CD and shows nothing in Finder. When I put it back in my laptop it shows the DMG file there as it should.... The G4 just keeps telling me my CD's are blank
 
Amethyst1 said:
Is it a CD-R or CD-RW? Try burning an “-R” at the slowest speed. Maybe your Quicksilver’s drive doesn’t like these particular burned discs — or burned discs in general due to age.
Click to expand...
Theyre CD-R's, Memorex brand 52x/700MB.... I'll try a few more discs but so far nothing I burn in Windows has been accessible in OSX... I found some articles online though implying that I cant go from 10.2 to 10.2.8 without doing some earlier updates first? Tried burning 10.2.1 and no luck with that either. Pulling my hair out here haha!
 
Amethyst1 said:
I updated from 10.2.0 to 10.2.8 using the combo updater I linked to above. :)
The crucial thing is to use this combo updater. The normal (“delta”) updater requires 10.2.7 and is no good in your case.
Click to expand...
Thanks :) Guess I'm stumped here....cant get any of these burned CDs to work. Gonna go digging and see if I can find a different brand :/

"You've inserted a blank CD"

I think maybe it's the CD's because in Disk Copy on the G4 I can't erase any of them, it says "This disc cannot be erased. Please insert a different disc."
 
ShadetreeSpecialist said:
I think maybe it's the CD's because in Disk Copy on the G4 I can't erase any of them, it says "This disc cannot be erased. Please insert a different disc."
Click to expand...
A CD-R can’t be erased though.
Just a thought — if you insert a genuinely blank CD, does OS X recognise it as writable? Try creating an empty folder and burning that, to see if the drive can handle the discs.
Right now I’m at a loss as to whether the issue is the way the discs were burned by Windows or the discs themselves.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
A CD-R can’t be erased though.
Just a thought — if you insert a genuinely blank CD, does OS X recognise it as writable? Try creating an empty folder and burning that, to see if the drive can handle the discs.
Right now I’m at a loss as to whether the issue is the way the discs were burned by Windows or the discs themselves.
Click to expand...
10.2 recognizes them as writable but when I tried to burn a single file to a genuine blank CD as a test when it went to finish it threw a "Sorry, the operation could not be completed because an unexpected error occurred. (Error code 6)"
 
To me that suggests the drive has issues with these discs. Do you have any other burned discs (a different brand maybe) you can try to see if the drive will read burned discs at all?
 
Amethyst1 said:
To me that suggests the drive has issues with these discs. Do you have any other burned discs (a different brand maybe) you can try to see if the drive will read burned discs at all?
Click to expand...
ok I tried an imation CD-R and it burned a test file successfully in 10.2. I burned the combo update to another blank of this brand (drag and drop in Windows, it closed the session automatically I didnt tell it to, might be a settings thing) and now when I put the disc in, OSX doesn't see it at all. It doesn't spit it out or tell me it's blank or anything at all. I'm going to try now burning the combo update in PowerISO or TransMac I guess & see if it reads any of those.
 
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I had to burn the combo updater to an imation brand CD-R using TransMac but that seemed to do the trick, keeping my fingers crossed but the update is running now!! It did NOT like the Memorex CD-R's...
THANK YOU
 
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Glad to hear you’re making progress :) Interesting that both the discs and the way of burning them were the culprit.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
Glad to hear you’re making progress :) Interesting that both the discs and the way of burning them were the culprit.
Click to expand...
Indeed! Memorex discs didn’t work period but yeah I had to use TransMac to burn the file … it successfully updated to 10.2.8 but the shared network folder between my old G3 and the G4 stopped working. Repaired permissions on my boot disc and made sure File Sharing was turned on but yeah seems I can’t win haha. I haven’t started researching this new problem yet so I’ll see how deep the rabbit hole is but thanks so much for your help
 
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should go with an SSD instead of a regular hard drive to speed up boot times and launching of apps if you can.
 
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