WiSkyDiver1 Posted December 12, 2009 Share Posted December 12, 2009 Longish post, but hopefully worth your time to read! :-) Hey! Great site you have here! About a month ago the apple bug bit me. I haven't touched anything made by apple since my high school days (quite some time ago, I went from my Ti99/4a at home to Commodore64k's in middle school to whatever apple that was in high school, circa 1986 or so?) and it didn't really bother me. I was browsing a university surplus store about a month ago, where you can pick up gateway P4 desktops minus an OS for 60 to 70 bucks, and this funky looking box was calling my name. It was an Apple Power Mac G4, 60GigHDD, 1Gig RAM, and dual 533 Power Pc processors. It came with a fresh install of 10.4.7 and was marked for $47. I complained because the sticker said "vga doesn't work" and the DVI is Apple specific. So they threw in a 17" Studio Display LCD monitor, and I was sold. ;-) Brought it home, and just fell in love with Tiger! It seemed to be everything WinDoze wasn't. Until I updated the software. It updated to 10.4.11 just fine. Then I installed some security patches. I got hosed. 2009-002 I believe it was that failed, and took the entire OS with it. Done, gone. Did I mention it didn't come with install disks? At least now I know why, it shipped with 9.1 and being a university, who knows where those ended up. Google (and thepiratebay) became my friend. There was a great deal of information out there, except for one little drawback, all the images I found would only be bootable in the G4 if it was burned in disk utility! Um, that sucks. I tried every workaround I could find, and was greeted with failure after failure (and a huge pile of fresh, new, shiny coasters!) Enter - Craigslist... I was at my wits end trying to get it back up and running when lo and behold a G4 came up on craigs stating it needed a power supply. A quick search on prices showed me why it was on craigs. (Ya want sticker shock? Google "buy G4 power supply") There was no price, so I emailed him. He said FREE! and he was 10 miles from my house. Go to pick it up and he hands me the tower (which is a freaking TWIN of the other one I have, a Digital Audio with dual 533's!), an Apple pro keyboard, and, get this, the ORIGINAL 9.1 install disks! SCORE! (Oh, and by the way, I'm typing this from that very G4. IDK what problem he had, but I plugged it in and it powered right up!) Anyway, got 'em both going, back to Tiger 10.4.11 and used the combo updates this time, no crashes, and decided I wanted to go ahead another step. Like everyone else, Snow Leopard! No dice, intel only. Ok then, Leopard! With the hacks to trick the install with processor speed I learned it could be done, but the result was most went back to Tiger because it just ran too slow on that old equipment. Now, the real reason I joined you, my HACKINTOSH! Like I said, I wanted Snow Leopard and sadly, I still do, but have nothing with SSE3 capabilities. All I had was a Toshiba Satellite A55-S1063 (yes, that's right, WalMart elcheapo). I researched the hell out of it, and didn't find one single successful install. A few attempts and worse, pages upon pages of ignored questions, failures, and problems. Did that deter me? Oh, hell no! After hours (yes, you read that right, HOURS. Not days, weeks, months, or years) of pulling my hair out, I have a working install on that very laptop, using the iATKOS v7 image. I admit I think I probably erased/reinstalled a dozen times, but it's working! Yes, I'm going to be posting that in the Leopard install forum, updating the wiki, ect, whatever I can do to help out. The hard part now is just remembering what options I used for the install! After so many attempts I kinda lost track. In fact this last install I automatically booted -v just so I could see where it would stall when it hung. i couldn't believe it when it didn't! Time to play! By the way, I'm still learning the terminal, it's been a very long time since I used a command line for much more than "fdisk" or "format C: /q" and as you know, those get used A LOT in WinDoze, but with a little guided help I'd be happy to post whatever specs, kexts, devil worshipers, boobies, whatever that's asked of me! Thanks for making it through my insanely happy post! Peace! Jim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yog70 Posted March 2, 2010 Share Posted March 2, 2010 Welcome to the board. I'm new to all this myself and am anxious to get my system working. Good luck! Yog70 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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