Haunted by the Black Box of Death

Ok, I'm having the most confusing annoying issue trying to install Tiger on one of the machines @ work. The machine is a mid-generations gigabit model G4 400 single processor with plenty of ram, and current firmware. Yet for some reason, as soon as i restart onto the OSX disc to install, it gets as far as the "choose a language" screen (If that far at all) and then drops the gray curtain with the black box in the middle w/ the power button silho. and the "You need to restart your mac..." message in 4 languages.
I've installed Tiger on dumber machines in this office, and none of them were giving me this much grief. This machine doesnt seem to want to get past OS 9.2, and unfortunately I do have to leave that inplace, as we still use 2 or 3 classic apps.
If anyone can tell me how to get past this screen, or even just what may be wrong Id love to hear it.
Thanks,
-J

Hello,
First, make sure that you have the latest Firmware updates installed. Refer to the article at:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86117
This will list all the available firmware updates for each machine.
If you already have the latest firmware update installed, and are still having this problem, then I would suspect bad memory first.
Try removing any expanded memory you have installed (leaving the factory memory installed) and see what happens.
There were a lot of marginal memory modules sold before OS X was released.
Many of these modules would work perfectly fine, and then fail completely once you installed (or tried to install) OS X 10.0
This was a huge issue back then. Many people discovered that their memory modules were just slightly out of spec, and needed to be replaced with proper modules that were produced exactly to spec.
Perhaps this is what is going on with your system.
Since you have been using 9.2 on that machine, your expanded memory (if you have any) may be slightly out of spec, but was not noticed by OS 9.2.
Hope this helps.

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