On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 8:24 PM, Cameron Kaiser<spectre at floodgap.com> wrote:
It should 'just boot' into the Installer. The
Happy Mac you briefly get
indicates that the Mac can see the disc, and the System Folder on it, so
the CD-ROM is undoubtedly working. I'm still thinking about RAM being a
problem, mind you, but your unit may just be plain broken if it's throwing
bus errors.
After playing with it a bit more, I'm thinking the cd-rom is bad. I
can see a slight aberration or discoloration on the disk. It's really
slight though so I could be wrong. When I get the happy face, I think
it's really deciding that the cd-rom is bad and trying to boot to the
hard drive instead. It's the same behavior as just turning the
machine on with the cd-rom drive off. I noticed that when I get the
frowny face, right before, the cdrom looks like it's starting to read.
Then it dies. So I think maybe the disk is bad. 70% of the time, it
refuses to read, and the other 30%, it starts to read and fails.