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[wove]

I was finally able to get a Powerbook G4 5,4 together in good shape from the remains of several scape machines. I found Greystash’s Guide for installing OS 9 on unsupported machines. (Thanks Greystash, the directions were clear and concise).

I burned the OS 9 for unsupported CD and after doing the open firmware changes, the machine booted from the CD just fine. I followed the directions, initialized the drive and restored the image.

Upon restart the machine began booting into OS 9 and all was well with the parade of icons across the bottom of the screen. The system just hung and froze. I restarted with the same result. Tried again with just the base OS9 extension set which resulted in the same hang and freeze.

Thinking there was perhaps a fault in the restore, I did a fresh restore of the image with the same failure. Finally I just copied the system folder from the CD over to the hard drive replacing the one from the image restore. This worked allowing the G4 to boot from the hard drive. It was good to see it boot into OS 9 from the hard drive, but I am wondering if it is less complete install than one would get from the restored image.

I am not really sure how to proceed to get a more fleshed out OS 9 but I am looking forward to making progress. If anyone has any ideas on why the restored OS9 image hangs, I would be delighted to hear them.

[ssp3]

Here, try these ROMs. I made them almost 3 years ago for my PB 5,4. I don't remember whether OpenFirmware dance at start-up was needed or not, though. I don't use that machine for OS9, too much hassle.

[wove]

Thanks for chiming in. I was able to sort out the problem. Sometimes the information you need is in the the shortest part of a long document. The problem was the "multi processor" extensions and once I deleted that folder it worked just fine. I now have a piece of hardware that will boot directly into OS 9.

I did create 2 partitions and used the software restore media to install Panther to one partition and the OS 9 Unsupported CD to install OS 9 to its own partition. The laptop repair/restore came out pretty well. Digging through old motherboards, I chose one that has a bad RAM slot and will need to swap that out. I found a battery that still holds a 2-3 hour charge. Overall this should be a lot of fun to work/play/fiddle around with.

I downloaded the ROMs ssp3 listed, but have not tried them yet.