New (almost)Tiger user

[Ron_Scheffler]

You could also try Disable Tiger Features: http://rixstep.com/2/20050528,00.html

In addition to Dashboard, it allows you to disable Spotlight.

While this may not directly relate to the OS upgrade, when I got my new computers, they came with Tiger and there were a bunch of new apps on them that I did not have before (or are now much bigger). One of these is GarageBand. I never use this app (though it looks fun). The other day I was surprised to see that the Instrument Library for Garageband occupies 1.35 GB! Another 1.1 GB of "Apple Loops for Garageband" Another space hog: Printer profiles at 1.64 GB on my machine. (all of these are in the main Library folder) Hidden away in Users/Shared are GarageBand Demo Songs, but that's only 367 MB. Some others: iDVD: 1.46 GB, iWork: 542 MB.

OK, on a tower with a 250+ GB drive, that's not a big deal, but on my laptop, when I'm regularly stuffing it's 100 GB drive with thousands of raw files... 6+ GB can certainly be useful. I just wish I could convince myself to delete most of the printer profiles.. but the funny thing is with a laptop, you never know when you'll be at someone's office and need to print something.

[John_Luke]

The Tiger upgrade went fine on my first two machines. Previously, all three were operating fine on OSX10.3.9. But my third machine is giving me fits. It is my old G4 AGP tower that has a 1gHz Sonnet processor upgrade card, and an Adaptec SCSI card that drives my legacy equipment like my scanner and stuff. OSX is on a second internal ATA drive thast I installed in it some time ago. The original drive still runs OS9.2.2. That machine did work fine on OSX10.3.9. (I basically use it as a dual boot machine by starting up in Start-Up Manager and merely selecting which OS HD I want to run. I only run my SCSI based legacy equipment under OS9.)

I tried Tiger as a basic upgrade, tried erasing the drive and doing a whole fresh Tiger install, everything, but for some reason, Tiger will not operate properly. The machine runs kludgy, System Prefs will not open, Terminal Window will not run commands. I verified the drive as OK running off the Tiger install CD. It's driving me nuts. The only thing I can think of is maybe there is some sort of SCSI or Sonnet conflict that is unique only to Tiger, as Panther installed fine as I recall, the Panther updates all went fine, and running OSX10.3.9, that machine ran fine.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[Mark_Bucher]

John,
I had the same problem when I upgraded a machine from 10.2 to 10.3 a couple of years ago. It too had a Sonnet upgrade and the Adaptec SCSI card in it. The problem is with the Adaptec SCSI card. It isn't OS X compatable and will cause your system to hang. What I had to do is backasswards. I installed the 9.2 Classic system onto the machine after I wiped the HD. Then I installed 10.3 after that. For some reason, it wouldn't take running a 10.3 install CD. Worked fine once I reversed the process; once both systems are installed, go into the prefs and select 10.4 as your startup disk and reboot. That's what worked for me, good luck

Mark Bucher, MSgt, USAF, (Ret)

[John_Luke]

Mark- thanks. I posted to Apple discussions as well. I also contacted Sonnet and they pointed the finger at the Adaptec SCSI card. Adaptec support is so convoluded and user unfriendly it was pointless to try to get anywhere with them. I did find on their site my card with supported drivers only up to OSX10.3 anyway.

I ended up wiping the OSX HD clean, removing the SCSI card, doing a fresh Tiger install on the OSX HD, then replacing the SCSI card. All is well on both HDs now. The SCSI card is only needed because my old scanner is SCSI only, so I keep that OS9 HD handy for those occasions. What a PITA! Actually it did give me a chance to do some house cleaning on that old legacy machine. I had a SCSI chain with the scanner, a CD burner and a Zip drive. I left the scanner on it with the terminator, and the CD burner and Zip drive are now on eBay!