I’ve been everywhere. MacAddict, MacFixIt, CNet, you name it. I cannot find an explanation for the evil that is happening on my Mac.
I have a beige G3 minitower 233, w/160 MB RAM, running OS 9.0.4.
I recently bought and put in a 4-port USB card for one of my available PCI slots. Then I downloaded Apple’s USB Card Support version 1.4.1 from their website, as the instructions told me to. I installed it, restarted the computer, and before the first extension loaded, got an Error type 11. It advised me to restart with extensions off, which seemed reasonable, so I restarted with the shift key down, extenisons off, and the bastard still crashed on a type 11 error at the same point in the little progress bar. I had to restart off the CD and remove the offending extensions from the system folder altogether to get the computer to start up properly.
What’s going on? Am I screwed? On all the other sites, people seem to have nothing but sunshine and happiness with 9.0.4 and USB Card Support 1.4.1. Has anyone here ever heard of this? Am I going to have to get 9.1? There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth in Lux’s house this day.
As always in this sort of situation, it is likely to be a conflict between some other previously installed extension or cdev and the new USB extension.
In these situations, I recommend you get ahold of Conflict Catcher and use its “conflict isolation” system to diagnose what other extension is conflicting with your new extension. You can download a free demo of CC that will operate long enough to diagnose the problem, if you don’t want to pay for it for long term use. Use it long enough to find the problem, dump the offending extension, and go back to using Apple’s Extension Manager if you like.
I will try Conflict Catcher, though it’ll have very little to catch. As I failed to mention in the OP, I reinstalled the system software after the first crash, so the only extensions I have running in there are the System 9.0.4 extensions, and whatever Earthlink installs (that’s the only other thing I’ve installed since then).
Now I’m curious about how you did the reinstall. Did you wipe the existing system folder and do a clean install, or did you reinstall over the existing one?
Anyway, I think I’ll recommend you update to MacOS 9.1, as there might be some resources that might make USB 1.4.1 function better. But it’s hard to tell. In any case, 9.1 has been very troublefree for me and I couldn’t find anything that broke in 9.1 that worked in 9.0.4.
So let me know how it goes and I’ll try to help if I can.
There’s an option for “Clean Install” or something like that. It renames your old System Folder “Previous System Folder” and just creates a new one in its place. So you have a brand spankin’ new System Folder, and all your old crap is still there, just not in use.
I’m thinkin’ I may try 9.1. Hell, the upgrade’s only $20.
I got the OS 9.1 update in the mail today, and installed it. And it crashed my computer. Same error message, at the same point during startup. It’s possible that Apple hates me.