DDR G4s - can't start over?
Okay, my 90 days with Apple is up (not that they helped) and my dual 867 is buggier than ever. JAVA doesn't work, I still get mysterious system crashes with my ethernet and IP address displayed in a grey box, and applications still quit unexpectedly from time to time (less often with this last problem since I swapped out bad RAM).
I want to start over, reformatting the drive and installing all the Apple stuff over again. Can I?
It does not appear so! I have a QPS Que M3 external drive, and the CDs included with my DDR Dual G4 do not seem to want to install Jaguar on it. 100% of the time the system hangs while trying to install OS 10.2. Without another drive running 10.2, I can't erase and reformat my main drive because Apple did not include a bootable CD other than the hardware test CD and the OS X.2 installer, neither of which appear to give you the option of running Disk Utilities.
I want a clean start to see if something just went wrong along the way or whether I have a lemon. Any ideas?
Thanks in advance for your ideas/listening to my rage.
I want to start over, reformatting the drive and installing all the Apple stuff over again. Can I?
It does not appear so! I have a QPS Que M3 external drive, and the CDs included with my DDR Dual G4 do not seem to want to install Jaguar on it. 100% of the time the system hangs while trying to install OS 10.2. Without another drive running 10.2, I can't erase and reformat my main drive because Apple did not include a bootable CD other than the hardware test CD and the OS X.2 installer, neither of which appear to give you the option of running Disk Utilities.
I want a clean start to see if something just went wrong along the way or whether I have a lemon. Any ideas?
Thanks in advance for your ideas/listening to my rage.
Comments
You should have got a set of CD's so you could restore your computer I did with my last two purchases (iMac G4 and Power Book G4) I would go to your Apple reseller and get what you need and waranty!!!
In the first window you'll see, you have to click onto "Disk Utility" or something like that. There you can repair your disk and fix your permissions on the drive.
HTH...
When I was reading the emails from people with problems, it seemed like most of the cause was due to bad ram.
didn't you know ?
<a href="http://www.macintouch.com/badram01.html"; target="_blank">http://www.macintouch.com/badram01.html</a>;
Yes, I know bad RAM = problems, I've addressed that angle as best I could.
Bad RAM does not, however, seem to be the source of my non-working JAVA or the network-related system crashes.
At this point, I just want to get JAVA working again, so I am going to reinstall the system (but not until Friday, I've got some work I have to finish first).
Anyway, here is what I've learned that might be interesting to some of you:
Turns out, that when the Jaguar installer asks you to select a language, up at the top is a menu that enables you to run disk utilities.
Apple does not support Jaguar installs on external drives. So they told me to kiss off on my installation woes.
Apple also has not provided users a way to reinstall single segments of 10.2, nor do they give you a way to generate a 10.2 or 9.2.2 boot disk (though I've read about ways to do it on discussion groups, it is not "supported" by Apple and it looks like it may take forever).
My own impression of all this - Apple is trying to frustrate end users and to prevent them from doing their own trouble shooting so that these users feel more inclined to buy AppleCare. When I went shopping for the darn thing the people at the Apple Store tried to cram AppleCare down my throat. Every time I called Apple support they tried to cram AppleCare down my throat. They even called me at my home a few nights ago just to make one last AppleCare push on me.
Anyway, my 90 days are definitely up now, and I don't think I'm any worse off.
My apologies if any of you work for Apple Support and are offended by my rant.