Install SL over Tiger. CD player doesn't work

[charlesconn]

I'm not Charles. I'm his wife, Erika. Charles is not tech savvy. I'm not either but better than my husband.

Here's the story. We bought a used iBook with Tiger installed. It works great except the cd player doesn't work. Someone gave him a gift of a Snow Leopard OS. Well, since the CD Player is on the fritz, I copied the contents to a Flash drive.

Do you think it will work? I'm afraid to try it because I don't want to screw up his computer. He'll get real mad at me if I do. Is there something I should be doing before I click install?

 

[Darth.Titan]

It won't work.

• You have to properly create a bootable flash drive to install OS X from it. Just copying the disc's content to a flash drive won't cut it.
• More importantly, an iBook has a G4 processor at best. Snow Leopard requires an Intel processor. It's not possible to install Snow Leopard installed on your iBook.

 

[charlesconn]

Wow, such service

Thank you for your prompt response. What a forum!

 

[SplicedBanjo]

In my experience, the optical drives on older Apple laptops were just flaky. I don't know the exact cause(s) for sure, but the fact that the drive isn't working is not much of a surprise to me.

You could get around it by using a Firewire optical drive, but you would still only be able to install 10.5 Leopard (10.6 is not compatible, as pointed out by Darth Titan).

The reason I say it has to be a Firewire optical drive is that, IIRC, PowerPC Macs cannot boot from USB (even though Intel Macs can).

 

[Darth.Titan]

The reason I say it has to be a Firewire optical drive is that, IIRC, PowerPC Macs cannot boot from USB (even though Intel Macs can).

Not true. PPC Macs can boot from USB just fine.

 

[SplicedBanjo]

Not true. PPC Macs can boot from USB just fine.

There are some sources that report that it wouldn't work (or that it would require some sort of extra hacking), which is what I was going by. I don't know if I ever actually tried it myself.