Where can i get back up disks????

Question

Hey whomever reads this
I just purchased a used emac off ebay with 10.3.9 installed. It did not come with system disks. I only have 384mb of RAM at the moment and will not be able to add more until after the holidays so i cannot upgrade to Tiger or even Leopard (when it comes out) until i can upgrade the RAM. So basically my question is where can i get the Panther Disks?? I would just like to have them just incase i ever need to reinstall the OS before i can get my RAM upgraded. Can you get them from Apple? The older OS's are available for download but i could only find up to 9.2. I don't want to buy panther, i would rather upgrade ram and get tiger. If i can't get panther, would i be better off creating an image as a back up to hold me over? If so how would i go about this and also it would have to be on CD if possible. I put the CD/RW from my PC (boo to windows) into my mac the other day but i don't have a DVD drive. Wow, thats a lot of questions i just asked, lol, if anyone can help in anyway that would be great
Thanx
Jeff

Answer 1

You can buy Panther discs on eBay and from other online sources. A good place is www.applerescue.com. Panther discs are not available for download and are not free. In fact the person who sold you the eMac should have provided the installer discs that came with the computer, although they may not have been Panther discs.
You can purchase Tiger directly from Apple. Tiger requires a minimum of 256 MBs of RAM, so you do have sufficient RAM to run Tiger.
I would get an external Firewire drive of size equal to the internal hard drive and then clone the internal drive to the external drive. Disk images are not very useful for system backups because you cannot boot from a disk image.
To clone your system:
How to Clone Using Restore Option of Disk Utility
1. Select the destination drive on the Desktop and press COMMAND-I to open the Get Info window. At the bottom in the Ownership and Permissions section be sure the box labeled "Ignore Permissions on this Volume" is unchecked. Set Ownership and Permissions as follows: Owner=system with read/write; Group=admin with read/write; Other with read-only.
2. Open Disk Utility from the Utilities folder.
3. Select the backup or destination volume from the left side list.
4. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (journaled, if available) and click on the Erase button. This step can be skipped if the destination has already been freshly erased.
5. Click on the Restore tab in the DU main window.
6. Select the backup or destination volume from the left side list and drag it to the Destination entry field.
7. Select the startup or source volume from the left side list and drag it to the Source entry field.
8. Double-check you got it right, then click on the Restore button.
For added precaution you can boot into safe mode before doing the clone.
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