URGENT: Install Tiger on iBook without CD Drive or Firewire Drive

Help!!
I have an iBook which needs Tiger installing.
However, the CD drive has pack up, and I dont have a Firewire External CD player, only a USB one.
Is there a way i can connect another Mac to the iBook by firewire cable and use that CD drive to install Tiger on the iBook?
Any help, advice would be massively appreciated
Glenn

These installs will work subject to license agreement:
1. Connect an external firewire drive to any machine.
2. Boot off CD and install on external firewire drive.
3. Clone back to same machine or move said hard drive internally into same
machine if it has the same interface inside the Firewire enclosure as inside the machine.
1. Setup an iMac G4 1.25 Ghz in Target mode with a broken optical drive.
2. Boot off Leopard on a second iMac G4 1.25 Ghz and connect the machine in step one to the machine in step 2.
3. Install Leopard or Tiger.
1. Boot off Firewire DVD drive the Leopard or Tiger installer.
2. Install Leopard on the same machine the drive is connected to.
These types of install will NOT work:
1. Setup an iBook G4 1.25 Ghz in target mode with a broken optical drive.
2. Boot off an iBook G4 1 Ghz and connect the machine step one to the machine in step 2.
3. Install Leopard or Tiger
1. Install on an external firewire hard drive from an iBook G4 1 Ghz Leopard or Tiger.
2. Connect an iBook G4 1.25 Ghz to the hard drive in step 1.
3. Clone back from the hard drive Leopard or Tiger (whichever is installed) or if the firewire hard drive case was a 2.5" hard drive Parallel ATA move the hard drive into the iBook.
The reason is that each vintage Mac, and each Mac model has distinct drivers.
In Target mode, the target machine (the machine you held the T key down) is assumed by the installer to be nothing more than an external drive to be a machine with the same configuration of the host machine because that's the only machine's firmware it can detect.
And by "work" I mean, the installation may appear it succeeds but circumstances such as kernel panics, and unsuccessful upgrades later will make the whole effort in vain.
Either replace the internal optical drive or attach an external Firewire DVD drive to install on a machine whose optical drive is broke, or get an identical Mac model to install using Target Disk Mode. If you don't have an identical machine, don't waste your effort on what can become an even worse install than had you left everything alone.

Similar Messages

How to install Tiger to iBook with CD Rom drive?

My daughter has an iBook currently running OS 10.3.8, and I'd like to upgrade it to run Tiger. Unfortunately her iBook doesn't have DVD read capability, only a CD drive. How do I install Tiger onto her iBook, or is she stuck with Panther forever? I have a G4 PowerBook with Tiger installed, can I use my PB somehow to upgrade her iBook?
Thanks
Kevin

Hi Kevin from Northeast (UK or US?)
As long as the copy of Tiger that she has is the black retail version then there should be no problems.
Insert the DVD into the PB. Shut the PB down. Restart the PB holding the T key down until you see the big firewire Y jumping around. Connect the PB and the iBook with a firewire cable. The PB's HD and the loaded Tiger disk will appear in the iBook's Finder. Select the Tiger disk and double click on the 'Install OS X' icon. You will then be presented with a choice of destinations and a choice of installation options.
(You could, instead, start the iBook in Target Disk Mode and run the installation from the PB. Same difference.)
Providing your daughter has no problems with her existing Panther installation there is no reason why you shouldn't opt for the 'Upgrade' which will preserve all user settings, preferences, documents etc., although it would be wise to back up to another medium before you start. An external HD is ideal, but spare space in the PB would suffice for her 'Home' folder at least.
The other choices besides 'Upgrade' are Erase & Install which does exactly what it says, or Archive & Install.
Not knowing your level of expertise on Macs I don't want to possibly bore you with minutiae but feel free to ask if you're not clear on anything.
Good luck,
Adrian

IBook wont boot up from Firewire Drive - it used to

I've been struggling with my G3 iBook for the last few weeks. It's a long story...
My initial problem started when the beachball started spinning and spinning for the smallest little thing. I would have a single program running but it would still keep spinning. I repaired disk permissions and ran MacJanitor. MacJanitor would take more than 40 minutes to complete running. It usually used to take less than 5 minutes.
I called the local Apple dealer (no Apple Stores here) and they suggested that I reinstall the OS. I reinstalled the OS, but that didn't result in any improvement. A few days later I got a warning from the HDD S.M.A.R.T. status saying that the internal HDD was failing.
I didn't have a backup of my internal HDD so I went out and got myself an external 3.5" Firewire HDD. I then used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the internal drive to the HDD. Cloning itself took about 8 hours - I assume because of the problem with the internal HDD. I then went to the system preferences to make the external HDD as the startup disk. I then erased the internal HDD. My iBook was booting up and running at normal speed using the external Firewire HDD.
Last night I noticed the beachball spinning again. It was late so I shut down the iBook. When I tried to startup the iBook this morning , the Apple symbol came up on the screen, and a few minutes later a Circle with a slash symbol across it. The iBook would not boot up. I tried this a couple of times with no success.
I reinstalled the OS on the internal HDD - took about 3.5 hours. I am now working off the internal drive. When I plug in the Firewire drive it shows up on the desktop. When i go to system preference I can select the Firewire drive as the startup disk - BUT when I restart the iBook it does not boot up from the external Firewire HDD. I also noticed that I cannot access my documents, pictures, MP3's on my Firewire Drive when I look through the contents - Did I lose them, or just don't have priveleges??
I am not sure what the problem is and why the iBook refuses to boot up from the external firewire drive. The internal drive still shows the SMART status as failing, and I am not in a position to replace it right away. I need to be able to get my iBook to boot back up from the Firewire Drive.
Please help
Thanks
Vir

I managed to get the problem sorted out.
I first started the iBook from the internal HDD and then went to System Preference to select the startup disk. I selected MAC OS 9 on the external HDD as the start up disk.
The iBook started up from the external Firewire drive using OS 9. OS 9 also showed that the iBook had not sut down properly the last time and verified the disk. Once I got the iBook started in OS 9 I went to the Control panel and then to Startup Disk. I noticed that I had 2 versions of OS X on the external Firewire HDD - one which said "OS 10.x.x previous system" and another which said OX 10.x.x. (When I select startup disk from OS 10.x.x it does not show both these options, only OS 10.x.x) I remembered that when I was reinstalling the OS (as recommended by the Apple Dealer) my settings etc were saved as "previous system". I seleected "OS 10.x.x " not "OS 10.x.x previous sytem" on the external HDD and re-started and it booted up ok.
My question here is - why does this additional startup option show up on OS 9 but not on OS 10? I figure that the iBook was trying to startup from OS "10.x.x. previous system" when it actually should have needed to startup from "OS 10.x.x.". This problem must have occured when I shut down ...
Is it ok to delete the OS X.x.x.previous system folder without losing any data etc??
Thanks
Vir

IBook hangs when running from Firewire drive

My iBook's internal drive took a dive recently. Luckily I was able to salvage the data and attached a bootable firewire drive.
It works fine but the system hangs intermittently for no reason. I unmounted the damaged internal drive and it is not showing under mounted drives so I am thinking that is not the problem.
My next thing as order of business would be to open up the laptop and replace the hard drive but I am wondering if this actually isn't a sign of worse problems like fw controller failing intermittently or something else?
Thanks for your help in advance.
G4 iBook 758ram 1.2 gHz processor Mac OS X (10.4.8)

I have no clue why it is still running. Basically the screen freezes and I get to move the mouse to no avail, I get the swirly circle moving like it is thinking, stays like that forever. I unplug the FW cable and plug it back up - the swirly disappears, I can close out of programs for a few clicks, then the swirly comes back up and stays there...unplug again and shutdown. Then I restart and I log back up into OS X. My internal drive is not showing up under "Startup Disk" as it got corrupted beyound repair. I wonder if it could be the hardware controller in the firewire adapter which is Maddog and not the best brand out there?
What it boils down is that this machine needs to be disassembled and hd to be replaced, I was hoping to stave off the inevitable by a few months...

How to install Tiger on iBook with cd drive only?

SInce Tiger is on a DVD, I'm thinking I gotta do a target disk mode thing. Anyone else done that? What's the procedure?
thanks

The procedure is to hook the two machines up with a FireWire cable, and then hold down the T key while starting up the iBook. Doing this requires that both machines are capable of running the retail version of Tiger; some recent machines can't. You should not do this if the other machine is a G5; one person messed up their system by doing so. Otherwise, you shouldn't have any problems.
(10018)

How to install Tiger on iBook G4

I have been given an iBook G4 and would like to upgrade it to Tiger 10.4 using my generic Tiger 10.4 upgrade disk. iBook will not start up from the Tiger disk even holding "C" key down. Also, restarting as a Target disk holding down "T" key, icon does not show up on my Power Mac G4. What am I doing wrong and what suggestions.
Thanks,
JDB

looks like 2 issues: iBook not booting from the upgrade disc, and iBook no mounting when in target mode
for the iBook not booting from the disc, see is you can boot PowerMac from the same disc to test the disc
if PowerMac boots, maybe iBook's optical drive is flaky, then you could try using external FireWire optical drive to try to boot from
to test the FireWrie, you can try to connect to PowerMac and use System Profiler, see what it says under FireWire
see if the iBook recognizes FireWire devices, if so, the issue could be with the drive on the iBook, anyways try those things first, see what happens

IBook G3 won't boot hard drive

Hello guys.
Recently I got a whole slew of iBook G3s, broken and new, which I will eventually fix and sell (probably keep one) but I am still in the process of fixing them and have a few questions.
I have this hard drive that I'm almost certain works (I can install tiger on it without it crashing) but it refuses to boot to tiger. I know it's not the iBook itself because I have a different hard drive that boots great, even in other iBooks too. I'm figuring the mbr config is jacked up, and ive already tried option apple pr and reset nv ram, reset defaults, and so forth in the firmware. How do I make this darn thing boot? And yes, I have tried to boot directly from the cd, but when it restarts it just sits there with the two faced mac face and the blinking question mark. I bet I'm going to have to do some magic in the OF, but I don't know what to type, so yeah...
Thanks.

But you said:
+I'm trying to boot from the OS X Tiger CD, and I know there's nothing wrong with it because I've done a full install on another hard drive and it was fine.+
Are you saying it did boot off the CD and install, but now it won't boot off the CD?
By the way, Tiger normally comes on a DVD. There are a few copies on CD out there, but they are relatively rare. Is your copy of Tiger on CD or DVD? Have you used a retail copy of Tiger for the installation? If you used an Tiger install disc from another Mac, that may not work on the iBook.

Can I install Mac OS X Lion on an external FireWire800 drive?

Can I install Mac OS X Lion on an external FireWire drive? I have bought a Lion Thumb Drive. I'd like to install Lion on the FW drive and then boot from there. The FW drive is a brand-new LaCie D2 Quadra 2 TB drive that has FW 800, 400, USB, and esATA connectivity. Can't find any manual describing how to do this. Any help appreciated. The more detail, the better. Thanks.

Yes, you can. When you run the installer you will get to a screen where you will see the default target drive, usually "Macintosh HD." Under the icon you will see a link to display other drives. Click on that so you will see the external drive you have connected. Select that then continue the installation.
For simplicity connect the drive using FW800.

Firewire drive will not mount on PowerBook

Firewire drive will not mount on PowerBooks
Posted: May 2, 2006 8:09 AM
Reply Email
Hi All,
A friend of mine has a Titanium Powerbook G4 500's with 640mb ram and OS 10.2. She has purchased a Fantom Drive 120gb Firewire drive to back up her work. The drive will not mount on her machine. It will mount on my G5 running 10.3.9. I went to the Fantom Site, and all I could find was a link to Apple's site on Tiger.
She bought a set of Panther disks and wanted to back up all of her stuff before the upgrade.
Any help would be appreciated,
David

Thought you could use this info about getting FireWire to work!
First, you should always Repair Permissions in Disk Utility before and after any update; I would do that now. If you installed your update with FireWire plugged in, your Mac may not recognize it anymore.
Try resetting your FireWire ports by disconnecting all FW devices, shut down your Mac and unplug it from AC power (wall socket) for 30 minutes. plug it back in and try FW.
If that did'nt work, download the combo update from this site (yours may be corrupt), not Software Update, disconnect all firewire + USB devices except keyboard + mouse, Repair Permissions, re-install update, Repair Permissions again + try. Hers should be the 10.2.8 Combo update. Others reading, download the Combo that applies to your system.
If that still did'nt get it Zap the PRAM. While restarting Mac hold down the following key combo Command-Option-P-R. Keep holding those keys down till you hear the second start-up chime, then release.
For those of you with Macs that are not PowerBooks or iBooks, a bad internal battery can cause FireWire to not be recognized, so make sure it's good!
Good Luck!
Cheers!
DALE

Powerbook freezes when I connect maxtor firewire drive

Ever since I installed tiger and upgraded to v 10.4.6 my G4 powerbook freezes when I connect a Maxtor firewire drive. I also recently installed Final Cut Pro Studio v 5.1. The maxtor drive mounts fine on another PB OS X 10.1.2. A Lacie firewire drive mounts fine on both computers. I can't figure it out. The powerbook with tiger crashes on startup when the maxtor firewire drive is attached or when it's just turned on. Does anyone have any solutions??

Welcome to the Apple discussion forums.
This isn't a guaranteed fix, however, did you update to 10.4.6 via software update or the combo installer? There have been some odd happenings recently when people have updated via the software update function. If you did the upgrade that way, you might try clearing your system and kernal caches (I use OnyX to do that, and other maintenance. It can be found at http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html ). Then download the 140mb combo updater, which can be found at http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macosx1046comboforppc.html .

OF can't see external bootable Firewire drive on restart

I've installed OS X 10.5 on an external Firewire drive via the optical drive on my Powerbook, however I can't get the computer to boot from this drive, regardless of whether I set it as the startup disk in System Preferences or by booting from the OS X install DVD and selecting it as the startup disk from there. The drive mounts fine in both OS X from the system drive and is visible from the OS X Installer.
If I Option restart to get a list of bootable devices, it doesn't appear at all.
I've reset the PMU, reset the NVRAM in Open Firmware and reset the PRAM and NVRAM by pressing CommandOption+PR.
I've changed FW cables, used the other port on the drive, changed the drive setting from slave to CS all to no avail.
I can boot my 15" MBPro from this external drive without a problem.
I'm unsure if this is related, but if I leave the Powerbook off for an extended period, when I restart it, it has forgotten the time and date, and can't seem to remember the airport network password either. Is there some PRAM battery which has crapped out?
What is going wrong??

Well it definitely sounds like you need a new clock battery. Unfortunately I doubt that is related to the hard drive issue. But for now try replacing the battery and reply back if the problem persists.

External Firewire drive icon changed

Without warning, the typical Firewire drive icon I've grown accustomed to changed on me. It used to be this:
http://flickr.com/photos/7624391@N02/482112390/
But now, every time I plug in my drive, its this strange thing:
http://flickr.com/photos/7624391@N02/482112392/
This second image looks like a compact flash card or something, so I'm thinking OS X is confused and thinks my Firewire drive is now a compact flash drive? How can I make it stop? Is there any way to revert to the normal icon? (I've tried the article in Apple's knowledge base about removing custom icons, and so I know its not a custom icon that's somehow been applied to my drive).

..."Without warning, the typical Firewire drive icon I've grown accustomed to changed on me."...
Was it really without warning, or did it begin immediately after installing the 10.4.9 update? This may be unrelated to your problem, but there seem to be some ongoing issues with Macally FW enclosures after the update, including incorrect icons in some cases. E.g. see this thread:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=69428

Computer randomly locks up when firewire drives are connected?

Here's what I have:
- 2011 27" iMac i7
- 2011 15" MacBook Pro i7
I recently replaced all of my USB hard drives with Firewire drives, mostly as a speed and simplification measure. Under USB, I had to have a series of hubs which seemed to slow things down pretty dramatically, as well as cause a lot of weird behavior, like randomly ejecting. And, of course, there was the inevitable birds nest of wires. So, since there was no way to add USB ports to the iMac, except for hubs, I decided to move FireWire and daisy chain them.
This was all connected to a dedicated iMac workstation, the MacBook was never connected to the drives.
The drives were added a few days before a complete system overhaul was done. The system had been acting funny. We're little things here and there (finder often had to be relaunched after a restart, wifi was not able to automatically connect, etc.), and the system was starting to lock up on a somewhat regular basis. So, Lion was installed fresh and nothing was restored from Time Machine except for a few applications here and there (nothing system related). Once the system was all freshly installed, the little quirks were gone, but the random locking up was not. And it was getting worse.
So, I did some of the trouble shooting I had done in the past; created a new user, repaired permissions, repaired the disk, etc. It wasn't fixing anything, just getting worse. I finally did an extended Apple Hardware Test and got the error: 4M0T/4/40000003: HDD-1285
I couldn't find anything on the web about it. So I called AppleCare, they didn't know what it was either. So I took the computer into the Apple Store. They eventually got back to me saying the hard drive and the fan had failed and that they were in the process of fixing it.
However, in the mean time, I moved the MacBook Pro over to the workstation where the iMac had been. Low and behold, within a few hours, I was seeing exactly the same symptoms I'd seen on the iMac. If the Firewire drives were plugged in, the computer would randomly lock up, and again, not even necessarily when the drives were reading or writing. It appears to be completely random. Sometimes specific applications will lock up, like Mail, VLC or System Preferences. Force quitting the application has no effect. The window won't disappear, even if I attempt to log out or shut the computer down. The screen will change to the grey background, but the window will never go away. It'll just sit there with the pin wheel forever. The only option at this point is to force the system to shut down with the power button.
This only happens when Firewire is connected.
I've tried swapping out the cable with no luck, the same problem is true. I have five drives daisy chained like this:
WD MyBook 2TB --> WD MyBook 2TB --> WD MyBook 2TB --> LaCie d2 Quadra v3 2TB --> LaCie d2 Quadra v3 2TB
Now, admittedly, I have never daisy chained, so I don't know if I've made some bad mojo for myself by my device order, or by mixing brands or something, or if it's even possible that maybe one of the drives is faulty and it's screwing things up for me. I just don't know, and troubleshooting is challenging becuase I can't make the problem happen, it just happenes whenever it feels like it.
I have to get this issue resolved. I could switch back to USB, but I'd hate to do that because I spent a substantial amount of money on the drives specifically to avoid using USB
Insight into this would really be appreciated.

I am having the exact same problem. Th eone difference is that on occasion, iTunes downloads my playlists yet not the associated songs in the playlist.

Can I install Tiger without DVD drive?

Hello all!
I need your advice and help!
Today I finally added more RAM to my iMac and proceeded to upgrade to OSX. I bought v10.4.3 Tiger at a retail location. Nothing happens after I inserted the installation DVD. Then I realised that I probably do not have a DVD drive! (I did look at the system requirement page and saw a slot loading iMac there ...)
Is there any way I could install Tiger? All your help is much appreciated!
kris

First, have you installed the firmware update required for your model? You must boot directly into OS 9.1 or higher (but not OS X) to install the firmware update.
Secondly, your hard drive must be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for Tiger.
If you open your Apple System Profiler it should tell you if you have a DVD drive. It was an option on your model, especially if you have the DV model.
If you don't have a DVD drive, then there are ways to install Tiger without one. One way is to exchange the DVD for a CD set from Apple. Visit the Apple OS X site to find the form needed for the exchange.
The following KB articles present alternatives for installing Tiger without a DVD:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/6976
http://www.applelinks.com/p5/index.php/more/osx_odyssey_752_how_to_installing_tiger_using_firewire_target_diskmode/
You can also use an external Firewire DVD drive provided it is a bootable drive.

How do I install Tiger without DVD drive?

How do I install Tiger without DVD drive on a Powerbook?
My Powerbook had some problems recently, the HDD and the Superdrive where gone. I replaced the HD but can not get Tiger installed here because the DVD drive isn't working. I boot right now from a FW HD. Any Ideas how to install the OS on the internal drive?
Any ideas would be apreciated.

See Option 2 in
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304129> or Option 1 in
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303028>
It has worked for at least one person:
"Kenichi Watanabe
Posts: 853
Registered: 2-Sep-2003
Re: Using DVD drive in iMac G4 for iMac G3 in Target Disk Mode-->won't read DVD
Posted: 26-Oct-2006 4:37 PM in response to: AJ Nealey
Reply Email
I just tried it between a Power Mac G5 and a PowerBook G3 (Pismo) and it worked. The G5 was Mac in Firewire Target Disk Mode. I started the G5 with the T with no DVD in the drive. I started up the G3, and the G5's hard drive appeared on the G3's desktop. I pushed the eject key (on the G5 keyboard) and the SuperDrive opened. I put in a DVD (the Tiger installation disk) and closed the SuperDrive. The DVD appeared on the G3's desktop. I restarted the G3 with the Option key held down, and the DVD in the G5 appeared as a valid startup choice."

URGENT: Install Tiger on iBook without CD Drive or Firewire Drive

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