I have a 400 MHz Pismo with 1 GB of RAM, running Mac OS X 10.4.8. Recently, I swapped the small internal hard drive for a newer, larger one. After doing so, I am having trouble getting the Pismo to boot all the way up. Here's what happens:

* I power the system on.
* I get the grey screen with the Apple and the spinner below it.
* I get a blue screen for a few seconds.
* Then I get a grey screen with a black pointer.

The system hangs there indefinitely.

Here's what I've done to try and fix it:

* Checked and reseated the CPU, memory, and all cables on the logic board of the Pismo.
* Reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled the OS.
* Reset PRAM.

I can boot up in single-user mode and run fsck, repair permissions, etc, all of which check out. I also checked the system logs and found this message:

"Overflowed waiting for chip idle during removeTransferFromGART"

That lead me to this thread at MacOSXHints, which suggested booting into safe mode and then removing the ATI Kernel extensions. I did this, and it seems to have worked around the problem for me. I can now get the machine to boot up completely. However, the video performance is somewhat degraded, and every time I run an OS upgrade, I will have to remove the drivers again to get this to work.

What I'm wondering is if anyone else has seen this problem before, and if so, what can be done to fix it? I suppose it is possible that I damaged something while working inside the computer, but I can't believe that there is a component I could damage to the point where it would not work when certain drivers were loaded and work fine if the drivers were not loaded. Or, is it possible that the system is simply "old" and something has "gone bad"? If so, what part might I need to replace?

Any thoughts would be appreciated. I know that the Pismo is an old machine, but I'm hoping to get as much life out of it as I can.

the lower performance driver is probably just running in VESA mode which has no hardware acceleration which is why you are getting the poor refresh rate.

why the ATI drivers don't work is definitely interesting. About all I could get is the ATI chipset got some static charge and messed it up while changing the hard drive. Not sure what to suggest besides replacing the logic board.

Have you tried putting your old drive back in? I had a problem with mine when I replaced it's first hard drive, it would not work properly, from what I read way back then the Pismo was limited on the type of hard drive you installed, if I remember correctly it has to be ATA66, this I'm not fully positive About. I picked up a 80 gig drive with the correct controller and the Pismo has been one of the best and most reliable machine I own!