If there’s one thing I’ve learned while working with Windows for many years it’s the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. I’ve not had many moments where I needed to apply this same mentality to my Macs until last Sunday.
Lately I’ve been having some problems with Moveable Type that have become increasingly annoying and more prevalent. I’ve been attributing this mainly to an older OS on the snapturtle server (10.2.6) and something horribly wrong with my Perl 5.8 installation which I installed awhile back for something I don’t even use anymore.
There have been other issues lately as well. Mainly when trying to back up the server using Carbon Copy Cloner it would crash… handy. I have been able to get backups using Retrospect Express but it’s not the solution I want.
So, before attempting to perform the surgery that crashed snapturtle I didn’t backup the server because I really couldn’t. Big mistake.
While installing OS X 10.2.8 the server crashed. Yes, that’s correct, in the middle of the OS update it crashed, hard. Upon reboot you can imagine what happened, nothing. The Mac OS X was completely hosed. Thankfully I still had OS 9 installed on there so I booted into 9 and copied all the data I needed over to a firewire drive.
Since the server crashed I figured why not install the latest and greatest OS, Mac OS X 10.3. What happened next was enough to really piss me off.
While attempting to install Panther the installation was failing every time with “There were errors installing the software”. What kind of errors I asked? Stupid ones like it couldn’t find the AsianLanguageFonts file or some weird error code that didn’t make much sense to me. After several attempts at installing the OS, I finally turned to the Apple discussion forums to find that I am not alone.
RAM was the ultimate culprit. Once I removed the extra two 256MB DIMMs that I had added over a year ago the installation went flawlessly. And just to tempt fate I added the DIMMs back in after the install and the server froze. Apparently this is a known issue with Panther and RAM modules. For some reason Panther is extremely picky with RAM DIMMs so if your having any weird problems with your Mac and your running Panther, remove any extra DIMMs and see if the problem goes away.
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Nice to see you back Jeff. I am sure I will be asking for your help in the future, when I shall soon hopefully start a blog. I have a solution to your Pepsi/iTunes problem. Give me your email address and I will send you the codes to all the “winners” numbers. I should get a LOT of them.
Thankyou very much for this info.
I had big problems doing a clean install on my Quicksilver G4 of Max OS10.3
After spending 8 hours trying various method including reinstalling from old OS CDs and triyng an upgrade I was getting more and more frustrated.
So my trick in making it work was to remove the two 512mb Ram chips leaving the 128mb. Did the complete installation and now (with fingers crossed) have been able to restart with all chips back in.
I am just going to follow up with a few extra keywords for other people with this problem, so they can more easily find your page on google: error, failure, installation, panther, osx, 10.3, software, install, fails, failed and “There were errors installing the software”.
Thanks for posting this info! I’m having the same problem and I’m currently attempting an install without the extra language files to see if that works. Haven’t tried removing the RAM yet but after reading this that’s definitely my next step.