No joy. But I'll keep plugging away, and will report back.

Well, things went from bad to, er, badder.

A friend suggested 'Archive and Reinstall' would work a treat. Fortunately it archived OK, but the reinstall left me with a blinking question mark folder instead of a booting Mac Mini... it's pretty enough in its own right not quite as productive as I was hoping.

In the end I decided to cut my losses - I could still get to Terminal via the Install disk, so I tar'd everything across to an external drive, and with a deep breath, went for the the full erase-and-reinstall.

Which consistently dies part way through. Hmm. I've tried swapping RAM (getting the case off that thing is still a bugger of a job), but no joy. Maybe I fried something, maybe it's bad Feng Shui, maybe it just doesn't like me. Regardless, it's not supplying a lot of joy right now. The error I get, 'BomFatalError - cpio read error: bad file format' has been thoroughly Googled... but not a lot of luck finding answers. The fact my Hardware Test CD keeps saying I have bad RAM doesn't bode well.

I'm trying to erase-and-resintall thing one more time, let's see what happens. I didn't want to have to buy a new iMac or something ... oh who am I trying to kid, of course I want one :) But I wasn't really expecting to do so a year after getting the Mac Mini.

So my old G3 iceBook is resuming (relatively) active service.

Sigh. Whinge. Moan. Etc.

Post #269,597 by Meerkat 10/6/06 12:42:26 AM Reply	No joy. But I'll keep plugging away, and will report back. Two out of three people wonder where the other one is.
Post #270,531 by Meerkat 10/17/06 9:28:51 AM Reply	I think it's dead, Jim. Well, things went from bad to, er, badder. A friend suggested 'Archive and Reinstall' would work a treat. Fortunately it archived OK, but the reinstall left me with a blinking question mark folder instead of a booting Mac Mini... it's pretty enough in its own right not quite as productive as I was hoping. In the end I decided to cut my losses - I could still get to Terminal via the Install disk, so I tar'd everything across to an external drive, and with a deep breath, went for the the full erase-and-reinstall. Which consistently dies part way through. Hmm. I've tried swapping RAM (getting the case off that thing is still a bugger of a job), but no joy. Maybe I fried something, maybe it's bad Feng Shui, maybe it just doesn't like me. Regardless, it's not supplying a lot of joy right now. The error I get, 'BomFatalError - cpio read error: bad file format' has been thoroughly Googled... but not a lot of luck finding answers. The fact my Hardware Test CD keeps saying I have bad RAM doesn't bode well. I'm trying to erase-and-resintall thing one more time, let's see what happens. I didn't want to have to buy a new iMac or something ... oh who am I trying to kid, of course I want one :) But I wasn't really expecting to do so a year after getting the Mac Mini. So my old G3 iceBook is resuming (relatively) active service. Sigh. Whinge. Moan. Etc. Two out of three people wonder where the other one is.
Post #270,539 by folkert 10/17/06 10:58:21 AM Reply	You might try and re-seating the RAM. blow out the disk with a PPC linux distro. see what happens there. IF all else... you can see what apple service says about it. -- [link\|mailto:greg@gregfolkert.net\|greg], [link\|http://www.iwethey.org/ed_curry\|REMEMBER ED CURRY!] @ *i_wethey* Freedom is not FREE. Yeah, but 10s of Trillions of US Dollars? SELECT * FROM scog WHERE ethics > 0; 0 rows returned.
Post #270,626 by Meerkat 10/18/06 12:02:40 AM Reply	Yep I'll give it a go... ... I'll pry the wretched case off the thing one more time, to see if it is as simple as 'John can't install RAM properly'. I'm not denying that's a possibility :-) I have a Ubunutu disc lying around - if I can't get OS X working, I might ahve myself a new Ubuntu box. Good thinking, Greg! Two out of three people wonder where the other one is.

Welcome to IWETHEY!