Hello, and welcome to Apple Support Discussions!
Having noticed you've posted the same question twice, once here, as well as
here:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10875742#
that gives people two chances to see if they can get it right.
Sometimes, issues such as remaining hard disk drive free space may come
into play when trying to install extra systems, update or more apps in a HDD,
that may be part of the problem in this instance. A 10GB HDD is not adequate.
Sure, I had an early white iBook 12" 500MHz with 576MB RAM & 10GB HDD;
for a time, it ran OK with OS 9.2.2 & Panther 10.3.9. (The OS 9.2.2 ran great.)
A lack of free space in the drive, and OS X demands for RAM along with its
automatic need to create Virtual Memory in hard drive free-space, made it run
a bit slow. A later cleaned up installation of Panther 10.3.9 without OS 9.2.2
did better; the working system plus some additional applications took 6GB.
A decent sized hard disk drive of at least 40GB capacity, and sufficient chip
RAM of as much as that computer's specifications indicate it can handle,
are both recommendations prior to an upgrade to an OS X version.
Hard disk drive format for OS X should be HFS+, not just HFS, for Panther.
The journaling should be turned on for Panther. In some cases, to do OS X
right, a new installation may be required; due to space and format issues.
To set up the hard disk drive using the booted OS X Installer's version of
Disk Utility, is the method to assure the hard drive is setup correctly; but that
would erase the content of the hard disk drive.
If the formatting is correct and there is enough free space on the drive to
initiate and complete the install, then maybe it could work without a full
new installation on an erased (disk utility option, overwrite zeros/reformat)
for awhile, at least. That old of a hard disk drive is likely at the end of service.
Presupposing the OS X 10.3.x install disc set is not from any other computer,
and knowing it should be a retail full install disc and not an upgrade-only set,
do you have the version number and information off the Panther installer discs
to share here, in case there is a discrepancy in this matter?
There are several reasons why it won't go past a certain point in the process of
installation. If there is a problem on the low-level of the hard disk drive, maybe
a sector error or damage, then the drive would need to be repaired; this may
also include the steps outlined generally above; where the drive would be wiped
and overwritten with zeros, reformatted, and so on, and be sure OS 9 Drivers
were installed if you start out with OS X install disc first, otherwise OS9 won't boot.
Some of the older computers do so well with OS 9.2.2, since it really does a lot
with very little resources; while OS X demands much more, including top quality
RAM and plenty of hard disk drive free space. The old ATA-2 HDD hardware
and a ceiling of only 512MB RAM limits that this can do.
You could probably see if the booted OS X installer's Disk Utility (accessed from
drop-down menu bar in Installer header) can use its Disk First Aid, to Repair Disk.
Could be something minor. However, now that some extra stuff is on that hard disk
drive, you should check and see how much remaining free space remains there.
This is critical and could compromise the entire operation as well as the OS 9 run.
Good luck & happy computing! 🙂
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