Reinstalling Panther... this is really annoying!
My PowerBook G4 shipped with Jaguar. I bought the PB close enough to the release of Panther that I was able to buy the cheaper $20 upgrade instead of paying the full price for Panther.
That was nice. I was pleased. But now I find out that the $20 upgrade is deliberately crippled to make it a lesser value than the full-price version.
I can't reinstall Panther using the upgrade discs I have. I just verified this with a call to Apple. When I select my hard drive, I get the message "You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume. A newer version of Mac OS X is installed."
The Option button is grayed out, so there's no way to select "Archive and Install" or anything like that. It's a complete no-go.
What's Apple's suggested solution? Go back to my original install discs that came with the PowerBook, and go all the way back to Jaguar. I'm expected to reinstall Jaguar just to be able to reinstall Panther.
Only because I have the "Upgrade" version of Panther is this a problem. If I had the standard boxed version, I'd already be on my way to a Panther reinstallation without any problems.
That was nice. I was pleased. But now I find out that the $20 upgrade is deliberately crippled to make it a lesser value than the full-price version.
I can't reinstall Panther using the upgrade discs I have. I just verified this with a call to Apple. When I select my hard drive, I get the message "You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume. A newer version of Mac OS X is installed."
The Option button is grayed out, so there's no way to select "Archive and Install" or anything like that. It's a complete no-go.
What's Apple's suggested solution? Go back to my original install discs that came with the PowerBook, and go all the way back to Jaguar. I'm expected to reinstall Jaguar just to be able to reinstall Panther.
Only because I have the "Upgrade" version of Panther is this a problem. If I had the standard boxed version, I'd already be on my way to a Panther reinstallation without any problems.
Comments
/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist
I changed ProductBuildVersion to 6R73, and both ProductUserVisibleVersion and ProductVersion to 10.2.8.
Now my upgrade discs are happily churning away at an archive-and-install of Panther. I don't know if this is going to fix the ultimate issue of my Windows file sharing problems when I'm done, but it's nice to have gotten past one hurdle on the way.