Gray apple screen and no progress wheel

Kenichi,

If you will read my post again, I did note he installed the OS on the TiBook; that does not mean he did not create the 8GB partition on the HD on the TiBook before installing. We don't have all the facts...

My reference to installing directly on the Wallstreet and the OSX installer refusing unless it sees an 8GB first partition suggests the Wallstreet will NOT boot to OSX without having the partition.

You keep mentioning the IDE controller. My information on the 8GB limitation is due to a limitation of the ROM. Can you cite a document that explains how the IDE controller plays a part in this?

I am not trying to be combative here, but you said:

"Again, some Wallstreets may have different IDE controllers, depending on revision. Here's a Wallstreet user who apparently has the 8GB limit. From a recent posting..."

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=3066431

As far as I know, ALL Wallstreets have the OSX/8GB limitation so I am not sure what point you were trying to make in the link.

The limitation seems to be a bit different between tray-loader iMacs and Wallstreet PowerBook. On my iMac, I cannot run Mac OS 9 from the second partition directly, only from the partition(s) below the 8GB limit. I have tried.

the OSX installer refusing unless it sees an 8GB first partition suggests the Wallstreet will NOT boot to OSX without having the partition.

The Mac OS 9 installer does let me install on the second partition without complaint, because it has not been programmed to look for this conflict. The Mac OS X Installer does look for this situation as a pre-emptive measure to prevent this problem from surfacing later. However, if you were able to bypass the check and install it on a bigger boot volume (as Devin MAY have done), I think it will work as long as all the OS components used at startup remained below the 8GB limit.

I do not know the technical details. It could be caused by the controller itself or the driver; I do not know.

However, if we are agreed that Mac OS X must be installed on a partition below the first 8 GBs on Wallstreets, then that's all that matters in this case. Whether Devin did or did not already partition his drive is certainly relevant, but since he tried other suggestions that did not work, I think it is relevant for me to bring it up as a potential cause of the problem (BECAUSE I don't know).

Kenichi,

Of course I am not suggesting you do not bring up the potential cause of his problem...it is most relevant. You may be 100% correct in identifying the problem. In fact I have learned from this discussion, especially regarding the early iMacs, and that is one of the reasons I enjoy these boards.

I would duplicate the procedure Devin may have followed on my Wallstreet just for the knowledge, but it is just too much work. Then I would have to repeat the whole process to get back to my original setup.

Anyway, thanks for responding to my questions...it has helped.

I found that 7.78GB (as reported in Finder Get Info) was the upper limit on my iMac. I wanted to absolutely maximize the amount of space on the first partition, so during installation of Panther, I went back and forth between Installer and Disk Utility, increasing the first partition size by small increments until Installer would no longer all the partition to be the target. Then I backed it down to the previous size. When you only have 8GBs and you are running Mac OS X, you need every bit you can get. I mention this in case you need to redo the installation at some point.

Although the common advice these days is that you do not need to defrag with Mac OS X, in the case of the small first partition, it is still a useful and needed utility. I use Tech Tool Pro 4, and do the optimize routine about once every six months. Note: Micromat just release version 4.5.1 and, unfortunately, it requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later. Fortunately, version 4.1.2 is very good and it supports Mac OS 10.3 or later.

So your problem may be severe disk fragmentation. It may also be a disk directory problem. Alsoft's Disk Warrior is the "utility of choice" for fixing and optimizing the disk directory, but Tech Tool can also to that type of repair and maintenance. I had a recent problem where Disk Warrior could not repair but Tech Tool did (at least well enough to save the data and reformat). [Apple's Disk Utility can repair basic disk directory problems; have you tried booting from a CD and running Disk Utility?]

I believe one thing that causes fragmentation is the swap file under Mac OS X. It is part of the Unix virtual memory scheme and it uses free space on the boot volume by default. With a huge boot volume, this is not a problem, but I think it becomes an issue when the free space gets down to less than 10 GBs. Unfortunately, our whole boot partition is less than that...! I noticed that as I used my iMac, even though I had 3 GBs of free space, it would slowly get "eaten away" until I had less than half of GB left (according to a Finder window). At the same time, performance became degraded. Restarting would restore my free space and performance. The more apps I used at once, the more noticeable this issue became.

The solution is the best performance tip I found for Macs with the 8 GB "handicap." There is a way to change the location of the swap file to another volume. I wrote a post about it a few weeks ago, so please see this link if interested.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=584979

Could it be a disk directory problem?

If you connect the drive to a Power Mac, have you run Disk Utility on it from the PM?

I can't think of anything else.

Since it (the PowerBook drive) is connected to a Power Mac directly, why don't you make a disk image of it using Disk Utility on the Power Mac. Confirm that the Disk Image is good by mounting it. Then you can reformat the PowerBook drive and restore the disk image back onto it. You can use Disk Utility for the restore, but I like using a free app called Carbon Copy Cloner.

It's possible that the problem will be retained when restored from the disk image. If that happens, you can format the PowerBook drive again and this time reinstall Mac OS X from CD/DVD. Make sure that it boots the PowerBook and the Mac OS X installation is made up to date (including the last iTunes and Quicktime updates that cause your problem). Once all that is confirmed to be working, restore only your user data from disk image. You should probably reinstall all third-party apps separately.

Does that one partition encompass the entire available space? I can see one partition (of two) not mounting properly (so you only see one on the desktop), but I can't imagine any way for a two partition drive to become one partition without some direct intervention on your part.

There are a few third-party utilities that can repartition without erasing

http://www.micromat.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=33
http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iPartition.php
http://www.subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?mainpage=product_info&productsid=6

But they cost money, and it seems like a solution using just Disk Utility would not be too time consuming. Using your Power Mac running Mac OS X, you can make a disk image of the PowerBook drive. After confirming the disk image mounts, repartition the hard disk using Disk Utility, with an appropriate size first partition. Then using Disk Utility (or your favorite cloning utility), restore that disk image onto the first partition. If there was nothing else wrong, that should make it bootable.

I have never heard of a case where a partition simply removed itself AND all the files from both partitions were consolidated into one partition. I believe the "optimizer" simply updates program linking. It is unlikely to affect partitioning.

75GB formatted from 80GB is probably about right. I get 112GB formatted from my 120GB hard drive. It is also a Western Digital hard drive.