Leopard on PowerMac with CD

As far as I know, leopard was never released in a CD form, and there is no way of putting it on a CD. You'll have to use firewire, what isn't working about it?

But you don't need to recognize the DVD drive as a start-up disk, you just need to run the installer software from it.

Or it just doesn't recognize the MacBook as an attached drive? (not sure that it would really, but I have no experience with this.)

if it is a DVD that came with your macbook (Intel) and not one that you bought extra (universal for Intel/PPC) it won't work.

Try the following:
put DVD in macbook. connect firwire cable between both Macs. Press the start button on the powermac and press T on its keyboard. wait till you can see the powermac as external drive on your macbook. than open installer and choose the "external" powermac as target, when the installer asks you where to install it.

Are you sure you only have a CD drive? Perhaps you have a DVD drive that can only read single layer DVDs. That's what I had on my Quicksilver G4. In this instance you can strip out many drivers and languages from the Leopard DVD and make it fit onto a single layer DVD.

Heavertron said:

Are you sure you only have a CD drive? Perhaps you have a DVD drive that can only read single layer DVDs. That's what I had on my Quicksilver G4. In this instance you can strip out many drivers and languages from the Leopard DVD and make it fit onto a single layer DVD.

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If its a Quicksilver its perfectly possible it might only have a CD-RW drive (It was the cheapest drive option, and so a lot of Macs you now get from schools/colleges cheaply tend to have those drives as no college is going to add DVD functionality unless they really need it or its standard). I'd say the easiest option would be to just find a cheap DVD drive for it (Like $5) and just install it, simple upgrade, and means that DVDs will be useable on the G4, which is always a handy feature.

robbed said:

So I use the MacBook as external DVD drive, everything works fine. I select the Mac OSX upgrade disk and the PowerMac says "need to reboot". When he reboots, he starts up as normal, from Macintosh HD. So he doesn't recognize the FireWire MacBook as a drive by starting up

Click to expand...

Put your MacBook in target disk mode and restart the PowerMac, holding option. The upgrade DVD should show up as long as its a retail one and not the one that came from your MacBook. Just click the disc and the next arrow, and it should boot from it.