Apple

Currently dead battery most likely, refuses to boot: when I forced booting from drive it crashed and now it shows unbootable drive. Tiger coming tomorrow

I used a 450 MHz dual processor model as my main work desktop for several years. A very nice, well designed machine -- very easy to open and upgrade, too.

Sawtooths (I hope that isn't a Yikes!) are pretty solid machines. My fileserver is a Sawtooth with an FW800 card connected to a RAID. It also has a ZIP drive for the once a decade I encounter a ZIP disk I want to investigate.

That is Yikes! , and it's probably the most botched machine I ever had to restore.

Starting from the fact it requires Apple-flashed DVD drive, through inability to accept SCSI controllers of any kind, to finally me being unable to even start installation.
I found Tiger media on CD and, while the machine even booted, I was always left with a blank screen with Finder not starting. After several reboots that even fails, because kernel panics (without obviously no flipping mean to see what's wrong, because startup was so dumbed-down by Apple).

I don't think that's right; if you hold down command-option-S you can see all of the "dmesg" output from the boot process.

Update: isolated the problem to a faulty DIMM. Now I'm running on single 256 MB PC133 stick, got installer working, but somehow Disk Utility freezes on formatting the drive.
Trying "Zero out the data" and it's kinda working for now.

Update 2: zero-ing out worked, now installing Tiger. Unfortunately the machine freezes way too often: I suspect CPU overheating as the heatsink is kludged onto CPU with plastic strips.

Yeah, the Yikes! are not too good (they earn their name from the video architecture, but that heatsink sounds absolutely primitive). However, it sure sounds like you might have a problem on the logic board as well.

"so it is determined": the logic board is fine, but the processor overheats due to loose heatsink. The freeze "reliably" occurs after about 2 minutes (+/- 15 seconds) of heavy activity, but when the machine is idle or with little activity, it can run very long without any issues.
There's good news though: I may have CPU upgrade and I have already put 768 MB RAM and new PRAM battery.

Problem solved! (PM4G AGP a.k.a. Sawtooth:))

There you go! My Sawtooth looks identical to the one on the left.

YAY! OSX and updates installed, already enabled nfs mounts, Fireflop in version 3.6 but hey, at least it's 3.6...

For something better, check out the actively maintained PowerPC Firefox fork at http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/ .

Yup, checked, not yet downloaded - finished at midnight yesterday so I decided to call it a day

Also, attempting to flash a Radeon 9250 to gain Core Graphics support.

I had a sawtooth at similar specs (except I had a flashed nvidia fx5200 card in there, that really helped when playing quake ). Fun box for sure, first 3 drives pretty easily, gigabit nics, flashed video... Those were the days. I gave mine away around the time I sold my PMG5 and one of the eMacs.

Anyways, have fun with it! MSOffice 2004, Quake and Unreal are probably what I would have installed on it.

Unfortunately, flashing both my 9250 and GF4MX did not succeed (incompatible ROMs, couldn't force), so I'm stuck with Rage Pro for now.

I hear the maintainer is a real jerk, though.

If the program works, he can be Ivan the Terrible for all I care. I'm sick of lovely sweet kind maintainers and shit software (could we be speaking of thee, Fireflop Dearest ?)

I think you guys missed the part where ClassicHasClass's email address is at the floodgap.com domain.

Man, you ruin my fun.