Low End Mac Reader Specials

TypeStyler For Mac OS X is Now Shipping! Download The Free Fully Functional 60 Day Tryout at www.typestyler.com

OWC: Get the Right Memory for Your Mac Top Quality, Competitive Price, Lifetime Backed Free Expert Support + Installation Videos too! MacBook & mini 8GB, iMac 16GB, Mac Pro up to 32GB. Click here

Poker Mac Don't install Parallels to play poker online! Poker Mac will show you how to download and install a native Mac poker application such as Full Tilt Poker Mac.

Laptop Hardware Provided by TechRestore - Overnight Mac & iPod Repairs.

Compare products like desktop computers, apple laptops, apple macs, and LCD Monitors side by side! All the information and reviews to make the best purchasing decision for new mobile phones, sat nav systems, or MP3 players. The Ciao online shopping community makes searching products easy for you.

Miscellaneous Ramblings

Installing OS X 10.4 'Tiger' on DVD-Challenged Macs Using FireWire Target Disk Mode

A 'Best of Miscellaneous Ramblings' Column

Charles Moore - 2006.07.10 - Tip Jar

Popularity: LEMLEMLEMLEMLEMLEMLEMLEM

Short link: http://bit.ly/hmZRR

Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" ships on DVD media, which is great if you have a Mac equipped with a DVD drive (as most of us do these days), since the entire set of installer files can be contained on one disc, eliminating the necessity of disc-swapping in the middle of the process.

However, there are certain older Macs that are officially supported by a Tiger (i.e., that have built-in FireWire) but don't have optical drives that support DVDs - notably some low-end iBooks and early low-end eMacs. My late 2002 iBook G3/700 has only a CD-ROM drive, and some of the education-only Macs were also CD-only.

Mac OS X Version 10.4 (PPC) requires a Macintosh with:

  • PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor
  • Built-in FireWire
  • At least 256 MB of physical RAM (512 MB recommended)
  • A built-in display or a display connected to an Apple-supplied video card supported by your computer
  • At least 3 GB of available space on your hard drive; 4 GB of disk space if you install Xcode 2 developer tools
  • DVD drive for installation (or get CD media from Apple for $9.95)

There are several possible workarounds. Apple will let you send in your Tiger install DVD along with $9.95 (details here), and they will replace it with a set of OS X 10.4 install CDs. If you don't intend on upgrading your hardware in the near future and have no Mac with a DVD drive available, that may be the most convenient solution.

Another possibility is to purchase or borrow a freestanding, bootable FireWire DVD drive and run the installer from it.

A third possibility is to mount your DVD-challenged computer as an external hard drive from a DVD drive-equipped Mac via FireWire Target Disk Mode and choose its hard drive as the destination disk in the OS X 10.4 installer. That is the method I chose for installing Tiger on my iBook, using my Pismo PowerBook's DVD drive.

FireWire Target Disk Mode is a great innovation, even better than PowerBook SCSI disk mode was back in the SCSI era. It's usually used for fast file transfers between computers and is the speediest interface for doing that, but it also works well for system or disk maintenance that requires mounting the drive from another boot volume and, as in this case, for system installations.

iBook in FireWire Disk ModeTo put my iBook into Target Disk Mode, I shut it down, and connected it to the PowerBook using a standard 6-pin FireWire cable (the same on both ends) usually used for connecting my external FireWire hard drive. I then started the iBook while holding down the T key, and in a few seconds the yellow FireWire symbol began bouncing around on the screen.

When I woke up the PowerBook, icons representing the iBook's three hard drive partitions were there on the Desktop.

I inserted the OS X 10.4 install disc in the PowerBook's DVD drive and clicked the Install icon, which made the PowerBook reboot from the DVD. When the installer screen came up, the iBook's partition volumes were among the alternatives presented as an install destination.

Pismo installing OS X on iBookThe installation itself was straightforward. I chose to do an Archive and Install, and I checked the option to have the new system assimilate user settings from a former system, avoiding the tedium of going through the Setup Assistant routine.

In my case, I also chose not to install the 1.62 GB of printer drivers, the extra fonts, and the language support files in order to conserve hard drive space on the iBook's 20 GB hard drive.

My basic installation took about 20 minutes. After the installer displays its "Installation Of Software Successfully Completed " dialog, it wants to reboot into the new system it has just installed. I discovered no way to defeat this, so the Pismo rebooted from the iBook's hard drive, which was interesting. No problems were encountered, though.

At that point I shut down both computers, disconnected the FireWire cable, and restarted each computers from its respective boot system.

In that instance, the Previous System Folder containing my old OS X 10.3.9 installation turned out to be more than 5 gigabytes, while the new Tiger system folder was less than 1.5 gigabytes. That Panther (10.3.x) install actually dated back to my installation of OS 10.2.3 in January 2003, when the iBook was new and after I had partitioned the hard drive. It had only been updated since then - many times - never with a clean system reinstall.

Doing a clean installation (save for the imported settings), recovered four megabytes of free hard drive space. Emptying the Trash containing the Previous System Folder took nearly half an hour and deleted some 90,000 files!

Using this method proved to be a successful workaround for getting Tiger into my iBook, and I expect it would work for installing Tiger on older, officially unsupported Macs using the XPostFacto installer hack, although I can't say for sure, having never tried it. LEM

Further Reading

Charles Moore has been a freelance journalist since 1987 and began writing for Mac websites in May 1998. His The Road Warrior column is a regular feature on MacOpinion, and he is a news editor and columnist at Applelinks.com. If you find his articles helpful, please consider making a donation to his tip jar.

Recent Miscellaneous Ramblings

Links for the Day

Recent Content on Low End Mac

Recent Deals

About LEM | Support | Usage | Privacy | Contacts

Miscellaneous Ramblings ©1999-2009 by Charles W. Moore. Entire Low End Mac website copyright ©1997-2009 by Cobweb Publishing, Inc., unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. Advice presented in good faith, but what works for one may not work for all. Please report errors to .
  LINKS: We allow and encourage links to any public page as long as the linked page does not appear within a frame that prevents bookmarking it.
  Access our RSS news feed at http://lowendmac.com/feed.xml.
  Email may be published at our discretion; email addresses will not be published without permission, and we will encrypt them in hopes of avoiding spammers. If you prefer your message not be published, mark it "not for publication." Letters may be edited for length, context, and to match house style.
  PRIVACY: We don't collect personal information unless you explicitly provide it. For more details, see our Terms of Use.
  Low End Mac is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh, iBook, iMac, eMac, iPod, iPhone, PowerBook, MacBook, MagSafe, Mac Pro, Apple TV, and AirPort are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are hereby acknowledged.

Custom Search

Amazon.com

Navigation

Used Mac Dealers
Apple History
Video Cards
Email Lists

Favorite Sites

MacSurfer
MacMinute
MacInTouch
MyAppleMenu
InfoMac
Macs Only!
The Mac Observer
Accelerate Your Mac
RetroMacCast
PB Central
MacWindows
The Vintage Mac
   Museum
DealMac
DealsOnTheWeb
Mac2Sell
ramseeker
Mac Driver Museum
JAG's House
System 6 Heaven
System 7 Today
the pickle's Low-End
   Mac FAQ
Abandonware
   Petition
Mac vs. PC Info

Affiliates

The Apple Store
Mac Connection
B&H
MacMall
TechRestore
ExperCom
Crucial Memory
batteries.com

Advertise

All of our advertising is handled by BackBeat Media. For price quotes and advertising information, please contact at BackBeat Media (646-546-5194). This number is for advertising only.

Open Link

Problems viewing this page with Internet Explorer 5.5 or 6? It works fine in other browsers, including IE 7. We recommend Firefox for those using Windows, as it is standards based and more secure than IE 6 (and earlier). More LEM visitors use Firefox than any other browser.