I've spent some time today installing MacOS 10.3 Panther. Thanks
to Apple's kind UpToDate program, I received my disks in the mail today
(late, my fault). Bad news–they are upgrade CDs, which means
that you *have* to have a previous version of…

oops. Kernel panic during install…

Holding down power button didn't do it. Three finger Mac salute did. Here's the setup on my test Mac:

PowerBook G3 (Bronze Keyboard)
G3/400, 512MB RAM, 12GB Hitachi HD
Processor card rev allows larger RAM and correctly uses L2 cache on board.

Installed MacOS 9, then a *very basic* 10.2, then started the Panther
install. Yuk. Tried this four times, no dice. I'm
going to pull the RAM tomorrow and see what happens. As for
tonight, I'm backing up my primary Mac, a brand new eMac with
SuperDrive, and doing an install from scratch. I'll break out the
restore disks, restore the 10.2.6 that it shipped with, then do the
upgrade from there.

What about the home server?
Well, it's running Jaguar server right now, so I'm not inclined to
change it. Wait, why not? Radio's backed up anyway and I
want to use it for XCode stuff.

RAM out of Lombard. Attempting reinstall.

:  Removed 256MB chip on top.  Had a similar
problem before the processor rev was installed.  RAM probably
isn't up to Panther standards. No prob, just a test machine.