I was trying to prepare my old 15" Al PPC laptop for a trade-in and I foolishly erased the internal HD (I was running from OS 10.4.9 on an external FireWire Drive). With system shut down and the external HD disconnected, I attempted to boot from my Panther Install Disk 1. However, the boot stalled at the gray scale screen with a dark gray circle containing a diagonal slash showing.
So, I then tried to boot without the install disk inserted and then inserted the disk when the blinking ? icon showed. Again, the boot stalled at the "slashed circle" icon. Finally, I tried to boot in the Single User Mode (Command+S) with just the install disk in. It started to boot, got to the grey screen with the dark grey Apple logo and the boot stalled (One peculiar fact: next to the logo were two short, dark lines as though there were pixels out. However, whenever I tried any other boot, the dark lines were not there.)
I tried to boot holding down the Option key and the Install disk showed indicating that there was a system available. However, the boot stalled at the grey "slashed" circle.
I then as a last resort, cloned the external drive (OS 10.4.9) to the internal drive (using SuperDuper!) and booted with just the internal drive available. The boot worked. That told me there is nothing wrong with the laptop's internal boot system.
Now I turn to my "court of last resort". Does any one have any idea why the system won't boot with a perfectly viable retail Panther install disk? Note, I can run Diskwarrior 4 without any problem and it works just fine. Tis' a puzzlement!
MamaMoose
