Installing Panther without the cd

[Phatpat]

Here's the deal. My brother is using a 500mhz titanium powerbook, and wants to install panther. He has the cds. Unfortunately, the cd drive won't work. It makes a really loud scratchying sound when you put a cd in, but doesn't recognize the disk. (they are fine when you take them out; ie they still work in other players) Is there a way to install panther without the cd drive? He doesn't have an external drive, though he does have an external hdd and an ipod. Is there a way to make it boot from an image of the cd's on the hdd or ipod? Any other ideas? Thanks

[MrYogi]

drag all the files and folders on the external harddrive and try.

[yamadataro]

I guess you can make disk images on somebody's machine with a CD drive and copy that to iPod or HD.

But I have a feeling that you will encounter some problems when the installer asks to swap the disks. Panther is a multiple disk install as you know.

Here's an idea:

Try connecting that TiBook as an external HD to another machine via "Firewire Disk Mode". Install Panther through that another machine to your TiBook's drive.

I've heard about people using iPod as a portable drive with OS X installed and carry your own system all over the place. So this solution might work.

[Nermal]

You might be able to get around the disk swapping. I have Panther on both CD and DVD, I'll take a look and see whether it's possible to "make a DVD" from the CDs.

Edit: The Panther CDs (and the DVD) seem to be ridiculously complicated and I couldn't figure much out. But if I was to guess, I'd say to copy CD 1 onto the external HD, then copy across the System:Installation:Packages folders from the other CDs (if that made sense!)

[Nermal]

Originally posted by yamadataro
Try connecting that TiBook as an external HD to another machine via "Firewire Disk Mode". Install Panther through that another machine to your TiBook's drive.

I don't know about X, but that certainly wouldn't work back in the OS 9 days because you'd end up with system software designed for the other machine (in regard to drivers etc), rather than software designed for the PowerBook.

[rainman::|:|]

if there's a way to do this, i haven't figured it out, and i tried very hard.

paul

[GigaWire]

Couldn't you build an install package using one of the developer tools?