A startup crash with certain CDs and Classic-free Macs

Nov 25, '03 10:35:00AM

Contributed by: danieleprocida

I got a call from a client: their G4 running 10.2.8 was pinwheeling at the Finder desktop on startup, for no apparent reason. We tried various things over the phone, but I was starting to get that sinking feeling you have when you're in Cardiff and your client's in London, in a noisy record shop and none too technically-minded, and things aren't going the way they ought to be.

So I put down the phone and had a bit of a think, and then called back and started on a new tack. At which point I got him to check the CDROM drive, and out popped an Illustrator 7 CD - and then the G4 started up normally.

So, if you've got a Mac without Classic, and you stick a Classic Mac OS autostart CD in it, you may encouter some difficulties as the OS gets sent off to do a task it will never accomplish (I'd like to know how this affects 10.3).

Apart from anything else, yet another reason to ensure that you have a working installation of Classic on your Mac OS X machines.

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