brop52.. you say there ar ways around it... what do you mean exactly??
I have a g3 snow 600 that I would lik to do some upgrades as well but I don't have the dvd drive either... I can pick up an external one for around 35 bucks but was wondering if that will work to load on OSX 10.4.?
I can't be certain since I've never tried this before but I'm fairly sure the answer is yes
Has anyone done this? if so let me know....
or do I have to buy an internal drive?
I don't think you have to buy an internal drive. If you do decide to go that route because of 'neatness', most laptop slot loading DVD drives should do the job. If you want a DVD-RW then you might want to research a bit more since I don't know if all of those work.
can I install osx on a hdd and then install the hdd into the iMac?
also I guess I can compress the file and burn to a cd than open it on the iMac....?
If you have a firewire port on your mac then you can boot it up into target disk mode by holding down the T button, connecting it to another mac via firewire (although until Leopard, I don't think you can do this from an Intel mac due to so many different versions of Tiger) and then you can boot the host machine and install Tiger directly to the drive. You could also take the drive out and put it into a dvd capable machine and swap it back later.
what is teh best ide here?
If you really want Tiger then the simplest way would be to get hold of Tiger in CD form. I belive if you call Apple up, they can swap your DVD for a set of four CDs which you can then use to install Tiger on your mac. I hope this helps!