I finally sat down yesterday to erase and re-install OS X on my old 12” PowerBook G4. However, I was having problems getting the install disk to run so that I could erase the drive and install the OS. I kept getting errors like “this software cannot be installed”, and “this disk cannot be used as an install disk”.

Thinking that wiping the drive would fix it (doesn’t it always? ), I connected the old machine to my new machine via firewire, and booted the old one in target mode. Then I used Disk Utility to write zeros to the drive.

So then I had what amounted to an expensive firewire drive, since it still seemed that none of the install disks we have lying around the lab (including 10.2,10.3) were working. The Panther disk was giving me a circle with a slash through it, so I went looking for an explanation for that, and found a thread that suggested wiping the “PR Ram”, by holding down Apple/Command-P-R at boot. While this didn’t fix the circle-slash issue with the panther disk, I decided to give the 10.4 disk another shot, and voilà - it worked! The rest of the install process went smoothly.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 9th, 2007 at 10:19 am and is filed under Tool Box, osx. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.