Hello,
With the help of good folks like LightBulbFun & Dearthnvader, I've installed OS 10.4.11 and was working on 10.5.8 when all this crap started happening. So along with the G4 card, I have 446MB Ram (more on this in a bit) and 4 HDs...2 running 8.6, one running 9.2.2 and one that has 9.1 and 10.4.11. These are old HDs and the whole system has been sitting around in my basement for like 15 years when I started reading about what I could do with these older PPC machines.
Initially when I started doing this back in late December 2019, I had 256MB Ram and it was 'mixed' with like 3 different types but all were 60ns. So running OS 8 & 9, there were no issues but after I got 10.4.11 installed I started having freezing issues (I also had a G3/500 upgrade card installed but got a G4 about 2.5 weeks ago). After trying several tshooting steps, LightBulbFun said to check ram. Well sure enough I pulled one of my 64MB sticks and the freezing went away...but that introduced another problem which was having only 190MB of ram installed. This was barely enough to run 10.4 let alone 10.5 and I noticed this while running 10.4.11 as the machine was struggling.
So I picked up 4 64MB sticks about a week ago and installed them along with the 190 bringing me up to the 446MB I'm at now. Everything was working good up until a couple of days ago when I was trying to install 10.5.8 and starting getting the SBOD otherwise known as the spinning wheel. The unit wasn't freezing as cursor still moved and initially I could move around and do other things but this changed quickly to just the SBOD and nothing working...but mouse still moved. The keyboard didn't work so I couldn't force quit or shut down so the only option I had left was to hit power button and do a hard shutdown.
This now is starting to happen randomly in 10.4 and so as I was forced to do a hard shut down, I started seeing Error 1 and Error 2 codes on files when I tried to use them. Thinking that I'm now corrupting files and such, I ran applejack last night and it came up with zero issues. Oh yeah, amongst all of this I did reset PRAM and rebuild desktop but it didn't alleviate the 'SBOD' hanging issue.
This morning I decided to install 10.4 on another partition and then the plan was to blow away my previous 10.4.11 installation as well. But upon starting the disk 2 installation and getting about halfway through it (disk 1 installed easily)....the SBOD appeared and it was at this point, I decided to stop any further actions and consult with some of you folks. Continuing to do hard shutdowns is going to kill this 24 year old machine eventually.
My thoughts are along the lines of either having another ram issue or hardware is starting to fail (like HD) or heat. I lean towards ram but last time I had the issue, it would freeze/lockup, not hang with the SBOD. So that's about it. Any thoughts, recommendations or advice appreciated. The 9650 was a great machine back in the day and I was trying to make it a great machine for today.
With the help of good folks like LightBulbFun & Dearthnvader, I've installed OS 10.4.11 and was working on 10.5.8 when all this crap started happening. So along with the G4 card, I have 446MB Ram (more on this in a bit) and 4 HDs...2 running 8.6, one running 9.2.2 and one that has 9.1 and 10.4.11. These are old HDs and the whole system has been sitting around in my basement for like 15 years when I started reading about what I could do with these older PPC machines.
Initially when I started doing this back in late December 2019, I had 256MB Ram and it was 'mixed' with like 3 different types but all were 60ns. So running OS 8 & 9, there were no issues but after I got 10.4.11 installed I started having freezing issues (I also had a G3/500 upgrade card installed but got a G4 about 2.5 weeks ago). After trying several tshooting steps, LightBulbFun said to check ram. Well sure enough I pulled one of my 64MB sticks and the freezing went away...but that introduced another problem which was having only 190MB of ram installed. This was barely enough to run 10.4 let alone 10.5 and I noticed this while running 10.4.11 as the machine was struggling.
So I picked up 4 64MB sticks about a week ago and installed them along with the 190 bringing me up to the 446MB I'm at now. Everything was working good up until a couple of days ago when I was trying to install 10.5.8 and starting getting the SBOD otherwise known as the spinning wheel. The unit wasn't freezing as cursor still moved and initially I could move around and do other things but this changed quickly to just the SBOD and nothing working...but mouse still moved. The keyboard didn't work so I couldn't force quit or shut down so the only option I had left was to hit power button and do a hard shutdown.
This now is starting to happen randomly in 10.4 and so as I was forced to do a hard shut down, I started seeing Error 1 and Error 2 codes on files when I tried to use them. Thinking that I'm now corrupting files and such, I ran applejack last night and it came up with zero issues. Oh yeah, amongst all of this I did reset PRAM and rebuild desktop but it didn't alleviate the 'SBOD' hanging issue.
This morning I decided to install 10.4 on another partition and then the plan was to blow away my previous 10.4.11 installation as well. But upon starting the disk 2 installation and getting about halfway through it (disk 1 installed easily)....the SBOD appeared and it was at this point, I decided to stop any further actions and consult with some of you folks. Continuing to do hard shutdowns is going to kill this 24 year old machine eventually.
My thoughts are along the lines of either having another ram issue or hardware is starting to fail (like HD) or heat. I lean towards ram but last time I had the issue, it would freeze/lockup, not hang with the SBOD. So that's about it. Any thoughts, recommendations or advice appreciated. The 9650 was a great machine back in the day and I was trying to make it a great machine for today.