Here's my story: Total Meltdown...

[Beanz239]

I got this iBook about 6 months ago for free from my sister. I love it, but recently, I have had the worst time with Mac. I wanted to install Xcode for my Mac, and I installed it. The only problem is that it said it couldn't run due to some bogus error... Later that night, I was just browsing the internet and my browser (Safari) crashed. I went to open it again and it just kept crashing. Then, when I went to switch to Firefox, it also crashed. I tried to go into my HDD or Applications folder and it crashed. Everything would crash as soon as I tried to open. I tried rebooting. I was stuck at they grey screen with an apple and spinning wheel for half an hour, then gave up. I took out my system restore disks and checked the hardware first. Everything was intact. Then I tried Disk Utility from the System Restore disk and all it said was that it couldn't repair the volume. So I remembered that you could reinstall the operating system without reinstalling user settings. I ran it. It was the worst mistake I could make. It turns out that I got 10.3.3 System Restore disks and a separate 10.4 disk. When I tried reinstalling the Tiger disk, it just kept shooting it back out at me. I couldn't even open the internet as all of my applications were written for Tiger. I asked a friend to do some research for me and she found that the disk included was 'part of a hardware bundle' and was not bootable or even readable by the computer. I ask you, if it's not bootable or readable, why even incude it?! So now I'm trying to find a decent deal on a bootable disk on eBay. If anybody knows anything that might help, it would be aprreciated.

 

[Amdahl]

Is the Tiger disc black with a big X on it? If so, then it is a legal copy.

But can your iBook read DVDs? If not, then that disc won't be able to read directly on your Mac. You would need another Mac with a DVD drive and firewire cable to install it.

 

[sickmacdoc]

I have to agree with Amdahl- in many of the earlier iBook models, DVD capable drives were either an option or not available at all- bootability is not really the issue.

Try sticking in a regular movie DVD- if it spits that out too you have a CD only drive which would explain why the Tiger disk was ejected. BTW- All retail boxed Tiger disks were DVDs- if you had purchased one new in a store and had only a CD drive, Apple had a special deal where could have them replace them with a set of CDs back then. That set is what it sounds like you would be looking for and they are far scarcer than even the scarce Tiger DVDs.