installing os x via firewire?

July 8, 2006 10:21 AM

I have a gray g4 running os 9, a g4 ibook running tiger, a firewire cable, a DVD copy of the tiger installation, and a burning desire to get tiger onto the (DVD drive-lacking) desktop. What are my options?

I'm not great with this sort of thing, but i'm more or less competent. Is there any way I can either boot the desktop into disc-mode and install tiger onto it, or maybe mount the DVDs on the ibook and install from them via the desktop? The desktop only has a CD drive.

if none of my ideas are any good, what are my options for getting tiger onto the desktop?

posted by cmyr to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Reboot the Gray g4. Hold down the T key (Target mode.) You'll get a Firewire logo on your screen.

Connect the firewire cable between the two computers. The icon will mount on your desktop.

Stick in the Tiger DVD. You may (or may not) have to reboot for the install.

When the Tiger Installer comes up, instead of installing the software to the iBook, choose the hard drive of the Gray G4.

Make sure this is the full Tiger install (and not the installer for the ibook).
posted by filmgeek at 10:35 AM on July 8, 2006

(by icon will mount on your desktop - I mean the icon of the G4 Tower will mount on the desktop of the laptop)
posted by filmgeek at 10:36 AM on July 8, 2006

Response by poster: will the ibook CDs be a major problem? I have the other copy somewhere, but I wasn't able to find it. for some reason I think I've done this before, but that might've been ibook CDs on a g3 pismo.
posted by cmyr at 10:50 AM on July 8, 2006

Best answer: Are they both for you? If so, just clone the ibook's hard drive to the desktop. That is, start the G4 in target disk mode as above, and download something like SuperDuper! to back up from the ibook's drive to the g4. That way you get all your stuff to start also.
posted by boaz at 10:59 AM on July 8, 2006

Yes. They will be a problem. The iBook DVD is not the same and will fail. You need a "Tiger" install DVD.
posted by filmgeek at 11:10 AM on July 8, 2006

Response by poster: I thought that there would be a problem cloning the drives b/c the file systems are different? but I suppose SD can reformat the target drive. I'll give that a try, it'd be my best bet for now. Thanks both.
posted by cmyr at 1:24 PM on July 8, 2006

Firewire target mode is your best friend - I've done exactly what boaz describes more than once. Dupe the iBook drive to the G4 and you'll be in business. Then you can create a new user and go from there.

Or, if you want to be legal, buy a retail copy and install it via the iBook and firewire target.
posted by aladfar at 1:52 PM on July 8, 2006

it wont be a problem, because the ibook will think that the g4 hard disk is just any old hard disk. the ibook DVD should contain a full install of OSX, and to my knowledge the only thing it wont do is let you get past the first screen if you were to boot from that DVD on a non-ibook.

as far as i know, OSX itself does not come in different flavors, except for intel vs PPC. so you should be able to boot the g4 just fine with the OSX installed via the ibook.
posted by joeblough at 5:26 PM on July 8, 2006

A purchased copy of Tiger will come on DVD only, you must send in and pay more for the CDs. (Hey Apple! That's a really crappy idea by the way. There are a lot of systems out there that will run OSX that don't have DVD players)
posted by Gungho at 4:38 AM on July 9, 2006

If you're not entirely concerned about the legality of it, you could just hit the bittorrent sites.
posted by roofus at 5:22 AM on July 10, 2006