Installing Tiger from external DVD drive

Hi,
My internal optical drive is damaged. I would like to install Leopard from an external DVD drive. I currently have Tiger on my system. But nothing happens when I double click on the installation icon. Any suggestions ?

Boot while pressing the Option key, then select the DVD.

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Installing Tiger with external DVD drive, why won't it work??

I have been trying to install OS X 10.4.3 from the DVD disk, last time I upgrade the OS I had to go out and buy an external DVD drive because I only have a cd drive in my mac. This worked fine last time but now I'm upgrading again it just won't work.
I can not get the mac to boot from the DVD, it sees it's there, I've tried holding down c, the alt key, the option key, choosing the DVD as the start up disk and checking the firmware, nothing will work!
I have read other questions of the same nature but I don't seem to have found an answer.
Can anyone help me, please??
Ruth
imac Power PC G3 Mac OS X (10.3.9)

I'm having the same problem. My mom has a Quicksilver G4 – four years old, but plenty to run Tiger. The only thing is we didn't get the built in DVD player. We got an external firewire DVD but can't get the machine to boot from the disk in the external drive.
If I try to run the installer I get a (-2) error that Startup Disk can't make the selected drive the boot drive. If I go into Startup I can select the DVD, but upon actual start up it can't find it and I eventually get the folder with the question mark. Holding down option doesn't bring it up in the list and holding down c does absolutely nothing.
Anybody else?

Reinstalling osx tiger from external dvd drive

I bought a new imac 27. I want to give my old power PC to a friend in need and want to erase and reinstall operating system, however, the optical drive on the power PC does not work so I purchased an external DVD drive and trying to install disc from that. I get to the part of where it asks me to restart the computer, the computer restarts, and the same message is there again, restart the computer. I am stuck in a loop and not sure what to do.
I cant seem to erase all my info and re install the disc. any thoughts or ideas of what i might be doing wrong or what I can try?
Regards
DH

Boot while pressing the Option key, then select the DVD.

Install Windows from external dvd drive?

ok.there is my problem.
I have a Mac Pro here.Last week the dvd driver stopped work and I do not have time to fix it now and I need urgently install the windows xp because need to use a specific app for windows.
Is it possible to install windows xp on bootcamp using a external dvd drive (usb).
thank you.

I have the exact same problem - my internal SuperDrive died and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay over $500 to get a new one. It appears to be utterly impossible to install Windows from an external DVD drive. At least it seems to be that way for me and my machine.
I've tried my drive connected with USB and with Firewire. I've tried rEFIt. I've tried booting with the Option/Alt key. My Mac seems unable (or unwilling) to do this.
I've found many many people with the same problem and only a very small handful that seem to eventually get it to work.
I've even tried to use the 30 day trial of VMFusion (which is not a long term solution because it doesn't use/mimic sufficient video drivers to support the games I want to play) to install Windows to the partition and I can't get that to work either. The Windows installer seems to refuse to install an older version of the system when the boot version has already been updated to a new one.
Does anyone out there have a way to reliably install Windows on a BootCamp partition?
Cheers,
Fusilier

Installation from external DVD drive

I have an older Powermac G4 that had a DVD-RAM drive and I replaced it with a high-speed Toshiba CD-RW drive. Is there a way to install Tiger from the DVD via an external drive or do I have to buy the CD's?

Assuming this Mac has a Firewire Port or Ports and you have an external Firewire DVD drive and your Mac and the external DVD drive supports booting the computer from the external DVD drive, the answer is yes.
If not, you need to use Apple's Media Exchange Program and exchange the Tiger DVD media for CD media or if you have access to another Mac with a DVD drive and both Macs support Firewire Target Disk mode, you can connect the two Macs via Firewire Target Disk mode and install Tiger on your PowerMac G4 from the Mac with a DVD drive.

Install data from external hard drive?

Hi, we have our old macbook data saved on external hard drive (old laptop had water damage but able to retrieve data). I now have new macbook, how do I install data from external hard drive to new macbook? Is it super easy? I didn't want to set up new laptop until I could understand how to install all our old data. Thanks

Do you have the appropriate cable to connect the external drive to to new Macbook?
If you do, the rest is easy. Connect the drive and start up the new Mac. The first steps in the setup will be to enter information about yourself, etc. etc. As you proceed you will be asked if you want to bring in data from another place. Just follow the directions, and the Mac Setup Assistant will do everything for you.
The critical part is making sure the external is corectly connected to the new computer.

Ibook g3 M2453 boot from external DVD drive

Hi, I'm Simon from Germany.
I have an iBook M2453 Mac OS X and a lot of dvds.
But the iBook has no DVD drive. So I bought an external DVD drive. But no matter what I do during boot (press the C key or alt)
I can not boot from external DVD drive.
Please help me
Thank you.
Simon.
PS: I have translated the text using Google translate

Hi Simon,
the iBook is able to boot from USB, but this is not expected behaviour and not supported by Apple.
http://support.apple.com/kb/TA20554
There are some external enclosures that do the trick.
But only when you press ALT after Power on. (Select a startup volume via the Startup Manager)
External enclosures with Prolific PL-3507 chipset (Firewire/USB Combo)
You will find them on Ebay Germany
I have a Delock IDE>USB 2.0 enclosure for 2,5" HDs
http://www.delock.com/produkte/gruppen/Geh%C3%A4use/Delock_25_external_enclosure _USB20_42365.html?setLanguage=EN
that works also.
Hallo Simon,
das läuft nur mit einigen wenigen externen Gehäusen. Such auf Ebay nach "PL-3507"
und nimm eins mit Firewire und USB Anschlüssen.
Ein Festplattengehäuse von Delock für 2,5" Festplatten ging auch ( Link oben)
Ein Boot ist nur möglich wenn du die ALT Taste nach dem Einschalten drückst und dann über den Startup manager dein Boot volume auswählst.

Install from external DVD drive

can i install Tiger from my external DVD firewire drive? how would i do this, it is my Imac G3 600 and it does not have a DVD drive built in.
Xelapond

Yes, as long as the drive is bootable you can install Tiger from it.
Insert the Tiger DVD into the drive then restart the computer. After the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. If the external drive is bootable you should see an icon for it. Select the icon then click on the large right arrow button.
If the above doesn't work, then insert the DVD in the drive while already booted into your current system. Open the Startup Disk preference and select the DVD from the icon list, then click on the Restart button.
If the external drive is a bootable drive one of the above methods should work for you.
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Installing from External DVD Drive

Can you install Leopard from an external DVD drive (USB)? I bought an external DVD drive and it has a faster speed then the built in DVD Drive in my iMac.
Thanks,
agent6998

I wanted to try this out and used my 10GB 3G ipod to install, and it actually went pretty fast. It took me ~45 minutes to install from boot to boot (not counting post-boot blue screen that took ~10 minutes or so, and then final setup tunings/customizations, etc.). The time saved equaled the time it took to copy the DVD to disk image, root around and find my old ipod, and restore the image to the ipod, so its not that much more efficient. Additionally, its an unsupported method of installing, so if something goes wrong dont blame Apple.

Installing Windows 7 from external DVD drive

I removed the internal DVD drive and replaced it with an OCW SSD on my 15" MBP. I used Disk Utility to format it to MS-DOS(FAT). I bought Windows 7 and downloaded the .iso file from the website. I used Disk Utility to burn the .iso image onto the disk. Since BootCamp won't recognize my external DVD drive I installed rEFIt, so after I restarted twice it came up with a prompt to boot from Windows install CD. I click the the icon, the screen goes black, and then the DVD drive stops spooling and I have to hold the power button down to restart it normally. What way is there to install WIndows 7 from an external DVD drive?

Maybe use Winclone (Mac app)? Others here know more about using Winclone than I do.
I use Casper (Windows app) for cloning an internal Windows partition to an external drive, so a Casper restore would be just the opposite, but requires a CD drive which you are now lacking.

Restore Disc Will Not Boot From External DVD Drive

I am using an original MacBook Pro that I decided could use a good restore, and started to clean house. The optical drive is broken, so I am using an external USB drive. I inserted the restore disc that came with the computer (It has OS X 10.4.6 on it), erased my HD, and proceeded to install Tiger. However, setup froze while installing Photobooth, and I was forced to shut down the computer.
I'm trying to get my Macbook Pro to boot from the restore disc that came with it so I can try setup again, but it won't work. If I hold C during the boot, I get a flashing folder with a question mark over it. If I hold option, I get a cursor, but just a blank, gray screen. In both instances, the external DVD drive is active and reading the disc, but I'm not getting any results on the screen. I've also reset PRAM.
If I can just get my computer to boot from the disc, I should be able to get back on track. Thanks.

When I press option during boot, nothing happens. Just a gray screen and cursor, like I described above. I haven't been able to test the external drive yet on another mac to see if it is bootable because I can't find the other computer's boot disc at the moment, but I'll try later with something else.
I have been able to access the drive through Target Disk mode successfully though. Is there something in particular I should do with the files? The folders are:
Applications
cores
dev
etc
Library
OSInstall.mpkg.998YblbM
System
tmp
Users
var
Volumes

Install Tigre from FW DVD drive?

Has anyone had any luck installing by this venue?
My internal combo drive is a bit dodgy with DVDs these days; i'm thinking of borrowing an external FireWire DVD drive for this adventuresome install. Anyone done this?

Okay, FINally.
I did it. Here are my super-idiosyncratic results. They go against just about all the expectations i had from reading recent posts... so I hope it makes for interesting reading!
Bottom line: Installing over Panther worked, without wiping the drive. There were some hitches.
First off: using XPF 4, the beige booted just fine from the Tiger disc on the FireWire DVD drive. However, I had only a PowerBook install DVD, and it didn't like my system. "This software cannot be installed on this computer. [Restart]" Pah!
I did restart, without benefit of XPF this time, and the Beige hung of course; I had to boot back to 9 to return to square 1. Square 1 in this case was my Panther system, and my lovely paid copy of XPF 4.
I certainly wasn't taking this first "no" for an answer, so I attempted to install the packages from the DVD via Charles Srtska's Pacifist, which lets you skip the main OS installer program and choose which components to install.
First, in Pacifist, I attempted to "Update Prebinding Information" on the boot volume (which is the only installable place), and this stalled out. Deciding this was probably not going to work, I re-booted and repaired permissions.
Then I decided "enough pussyfooting." In Pacifist, I went straight to "Open OS X Installation Package" and selected everything except the printer drivers and foreign language localizations on the DVD and just said "Install".
Then it got interesting.
First of all, obviously Tiger is installing a great number of files which are identical in name to the Panther files they are replacing, and this is occurring on your present boot volume! Pacifist wants to ask you about each one of these 20,000 situations. Hesitantly, I checked "answer yes to all." Note: the beige had NOT booted from the DVD, Pacifist was just pulling the install packages from the DVD - and I'm pretty sure it was writing those files over the system files on the boot volume. Whoa! Is that even possible?
There was a Pacifist question about whether to update or replace ".app" bundles, with the risk that the apps would be unbundled into folders. I said I wanted to "update" in every such situation to maintain bundling, I think. Apparently the right choice.
There were several glitches when a "replace file" operation was refused: "...because a file cannot be replaced by a folder." One of these was an important Java folder, possibly the main Java app.; I grimaced and clicked OK each time. Several times these questions stopped the install for hours, by the way, since I was away from the computer.
However the install ran until the end. Finally, after installation and optimization, Pacifist wanted to update prebinding information on the boot disc, as I had tried to do before the installation. This operation was allowed to go for 12 hours but when I checked again, it had evidently stalled, so I force-quit Pacifist and restarted in OS 9. Fortunately I still have an OS 9 boot volume ... Then, XPF showed the option of rebooting in 10.4 on the volume where I had been doing the installation. Would it work?
Tiger booted all right. But it did not recognize my login, or my password, or my admin password, and did not let me login as root. The Tiger install DVD, being uncooperative, would not let me reset the admin password; I did finally accomplish this from the Panther install CD 1.
And then I could boot into Tiger as 'root'. In Sys Prefs: Accounts, I "created" my old two accounts again. Tiger asked if I wanted to use the same folders for these "new" accounts with the same old user names, I said yes. When I logged out of 'root' and logged in as each of these users, Tiger booted with all the old Panther prefs proper to each user. No migration necessary so far (haven't tested iphoto or itunes however).
Just now I have installed the 10.4.4 combined update, and repaired permissions with Onyx. Smooth.
After all that, I ran Software Update and - impressively - the missing Java file was noticed and reinstalled
I think it's time for me to pay for my copy of Pacifist!
I will say this: Tiger does not seem particularly faster than Panther on my machine, and it does not boot faster. I had Panther booting in half a minute, due to some stratagem posted on this forum which cuts the hardware check off during startup; I think this was achieved by force-shutting-down the startup process at some point and immediately rebooting, but I don't remember. Does anyone else?

Problem booting from external DVD drive on Lenovo S10e

Hi,
I recently purchased a new Lenovo S10e ideapad, a few weeks prior to that I purchased an external DVD rewriter drive manufactured by LG, the drive works perfectly on every computer I try with the exception of the Lenovo ideapad S10e.
The thing is that the drive is being recognized and installed by the Windows XP Home Edition the S10e came with but when I try to boot a bootable CD using then drive on the S10e ideapad I almost alwasy fail to do so.
I set the S10e BIOS to have the USB CDROM as first boot device, in addition I used the F12 key to use the boot menu to choose the boot device, in 9 out 0f 10 atempts my external drive will not show in the boot menu and when choosing the enter setup option I see that the BIOS do not list it as the USB CDROM, instead it says "USB CDROM:" rather than have the drive name after it.
In the 1 time out of 10 it does work the BIOS seem to be identifying the drive and it shows in the boot menu, however I cannot work with it for a more than 1 minute without it stopped being recognized again.
The problem seems very strange to me as the drive works under the windows operating system and do not have any problem whatsoever on other computers, I have tested the external drive on my PC, another Mini Laptop from LG and a GIGABYTE Laptop (Normal one), all of which had no problems recognizing the external drive and booting from it.
I will really appreciate if I can get some help with the problem.
Thanks.

I've had a similar issue with X61 and the external DVD drive from Lenovo.
In my case, it was the power issue. On the back of the drive, there is a small table says that the drive needs a 3.0A 5V power input. One USB 2.0 port can only provide 0.5A. I don't know if the drive has any special, low power mode, but I suspect that even if it has, 0.5A is still not enough to fully power it. I've checked the current with the multimeter, and at peak times, the drive draws 550mA. Even then, it makes a stuttering sound for a few seconds, before finally spinning the DVD disk. I've also noticed that the DVD works most of the times when it's connected to the left USB port. That may be because of how the laptop's internal power circuicity is laid out (+separate USB host controller for each 'side' of the laptop). Another thing that seems to help is to disable all 5V driven devices that the laptop uses: the wifi card, bluetooth, any additional devices connected to the USB bus / to the ethernet port / SD card port (I'm not actually sure which of the devices are 5V and which are 3.3V, but the best option is to disable all of them), maybe even remove the battery (if it's charging). Finally, the DVD drive works better if the laptop was turned on and runnig for some time, rather than it being turned on "a minute before". Also, in the BIOS, there is a setting that changes the speed of the DVD drive, but switching it to "low" didn't seem to affect the external drive (at least not before Windows boots up).

Reinstalling OS from external DVD drive

How do I reinstall the OS from a DVD in an external DVD drive connected to the USB port on my MacBook?
Thank you.

I don't think you can, only via the external optical drive.
You can try a USB though, or install on a external drive, then option boot from it then clone it to the external drive.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16276201#16276201

All users GONE except for "Other"...and CANNOT boot from External DVD drive

I booted the iMac (Intel...the last one with the White Bezel) tonight, and all of my users were GONE except for "Other." The internal Superdrive has had a disc jammed in it for months, so instead I have an OWC external USB/FW400/FW800 DVD drive. Snow Leaopard.
I need to boot from the SL install disc, but that must go into the external drive...which, as it's been since I upgraded to SL, the Mac sometimes sees and sometimes doesn't. Right now it can't see it. Which leaves me a big pile of crap, doesn't it?
So, what to do? I can't boot the internal drive because it's jammed with a DVD (or I spend $300 to replace what should be a $20 optical drive in it), I can't boot the external DVD drive because the iMac w/Snow Lepeord can't see it, and, meanwhile, all of my photos, etc., are on my Time Machine backup drive...which, as long as I can't do any of the above, just sits there...useless.
Can you tell I'm a bit frustrated with this?
I've reset the PRAM. I've rebooted. I've held down all sorts of combinations of keys. I've tried every single interface type on the external drive and the same thing - the drive can't be seen by the computer.
Has the internal hard drive failed? Nope. I'm tying this using the Firefox browser that's running on my Windows XP installation via Boot Camp on the internal hard drive.

Thanks, but no luck so far.
I have an old iMac G3 downstairs, and I connected it to the machine via Firewire. I could see the disk on the 24" iMac, its folders, etc. I wanted to see if I could install OS X via Target Disk Mode from the old machine to the new one, but it's a PowerPC machine and you can't do that. Maybe you can't do that from ANY iMac...I'm not that experienced.
Now the iMac isn't booting at all to Windows via Boot Camp - it's been booting for 45 minutes now with the "WinXP" logo, but nothing. I'm about to throw it in the car and haul it over to my parents, who have both a Powerbook and a 27" iMac. Maybe it'll work there. Who knows.
Other ideas...replace the internal hard drive (cheap)...if that doesn't work, I'll just sell the thing. I'm not going to sink $300 into the thing when I can get a new machine for around $600-$700. I may go to a Windows7 machine on the desktop and a Powerbook...maybe even an iPad.
I really want to love this iMac. It's my first (well, I did have the G3, but that was just to play with) Mac. It's given me a ton of problems since I bought it new. It's always been a "stock" machine - nothing weird done to it. I was hit with an iMovie update once, and that broke iMovie. Even the new iLife 2009 didn't fix it. Then, the internal optical disk drive failed. I couldn't believe that Apple used a proprietary optical drive rather than a stock Pioneer model. Price for the drive alone? $200.
I installed Snow Leopard 2 months ago, and that completely broke my ability to use external optical drives. Sometimes they work...most times they don't. This is an ongoing problem that many people are having (check the forums)...but no fix. Where does that leave me? With a useless computer.
So, I've boiled it down to this: I love the Mac software. I hate the hardware. Sure, it's pretty, but if something goes wrong, get ready to pay. I hate that Apple knows about problems, yet does nothing to address them, like the problem with external optical drives and Snow Leopard.
I bought the Mac because I was sick of Microsoft not being able to simply produce an OS full of security holes. Often times I read people bashing supposed "driver ****" with Windows, but look at what users of Windows machine are demanding of Microsoft - "please make my software compatible with the trillions of combinations of hardware that can run the os...all the way back to stuff that was created in the mid 1990s." Meanwhile, from my experience, Apple can't get their software to work with their own proprietary, supposedly vertically-controlled hardware.
Windows7 is a not bad OS. It's got it's faults, of course. But, if my optical drive failed in a Windows box, I'd have it replaced in 10 minutes...with a bluray drive...that can write...for under $100.
I use my computer for pictures, etc. In fact, we were ready to send off to iPhoto for our yearly photo books. That's not going to happen, as the photos are forever trapped on my Time Machine backup drive (lesson learned: dump photos to a generic format...fat32 works...just in case you decide to switch from Mac to Win7). iLife is great. MS Office is great, too, on the Mac. I love the little things the Mac does right.
After years of screwing around with my Windows box, I wanted a computer that acted like a consumer electronic device. That's not what I've gotten.
Ugh, so now do I buy a Mac Mini for $700, a new iMac for $1,400, or a Macbook Pro and a mac mini?
...or...do I continue to work within this silly Ubuntu Linux world?
Whatever the answer, I wish I didn't have to ask the question now.

Installing Tiger from external DVD drive

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