Installing Leopard from Gray Disks

[bunnspecial]

Just thought I'd give a quick report on this...

Our own wise Intell has stated that all Leopard disks, whether retail or system specific(gray) disks are universal for both PowerPC and Intel processors.

Of course, in general this isn't a huge help to us in the PPC community, as grey disks will only install on the system for which they are intended, and Leopard was released well after the PPC era there are no grey disks intended for PPC systems.

In any case, a little while back I bought a late 2007 black Macbook that had a bad hard drive. I installed a solid state drive, but my 10.5.0 retail disk refused to install on it.

On Intell's advice, I cloned a Leopard install off one of my PPC computers onto the Macbook, and it worked perfectly. I eventually upgraded the Macbook to Lion. I also acquired a set of grey disks for it, and installed 10.5 onto a separate partition.

Earlier this evening, I was working on fixing up a Quicksilver for a friend. I wanted to install Leopard on it, although the computer does not officially support it(733mhz processor). I typically install using TDM in this situation rather than mess around with Leopard Assist(plus the Quicksilver doesn't have a DVD drive at the moment, which would have meant changing out the ODD also to install Leopard directly.

Purely on a whim, I decided to try cloning the Leopard install off my Macbook. I booted the QS in TDM, and used Disk Utility on the Macbook to reformat the destination hard drive into Mac OS Extended and APM. I then fired up Carbon Copy Cloner, ignored the warning about Intel Macs not being bootable off an APM drive, and proceeded to clone.

I am happy to report that doing so worked perfectly-once CCC finished cloning the drive, I restarted the Quicksilver and it booted right into Leopard.

Admittedly, all of the above required my having the computer associated with they gray disks, but I was able to get Leopard onto a PPC computer using these disks.

 

[Altemose]

Not sure why this is surprising as Leopard regardless of disk version and color were universal. The only difference with gray disks is that they contained a supported machine list to which the installer will only install to.

 

[bunnspecial]

I actually would have been more surprised if it had not worked based on what Intell has said about all being universal.

With that said, I primarily wrote this up to give my actual experience with the fact that it can be done. There's a lot of bad information floating around on the internet that cloning disks between PPC and Intel computers won't work.

Of course, as a general rule what I did only works with Leopard, as most Tiger installs are not universal and of course Snow Leopard has no PPC version. Cloning is also necessary rather than simply swapping drives, due to the partitioning requirement differences between the two architectures(APM vs GUID). As I've found through experimenting with this computer, though, cloning Leopard does in fact worth both ways.

 

[Altemose]

I actually would have been more surprised if it had not worked based on what Intell has said about all being universal.

With that said, I primarily wrote this up to give my actual experience with the fact that it can be done. There's a lot of bad information floating around on the internet that cloning disks between PPC and Intel computers won't work.

Of course, as a general rule what I did only works with Leopard, as most Tiger installs are not universal and of course Snow Leopard has no PPC version. Cloning is also necessary rather than simply swapping drives, due to the partitioning requirement differences between the two architectures(APM vs GUID). As I've found through experimenting with this computer, though, cloning Leopard does in fact worth both ways.

I in no way wanted to sound like I thought your post was pointless. Sorry if it came across that way. I was just pointing out that most know that Leopard was universal. It is quite shocking the amount of misinformation on the Internet on the matter. Though, I do recommend people do a fresh install when switching between APM and GUID, but it will work as you demonstrated through cloning.

 

[jbarley]

Also worth noting is that cloning would not work between systems if one had modified their system like many do using any form of code slimming to remove the unwanted code be it PPC or Intel.

 

[bunnspecial]

I in no way wanted to sound like I thought your post was pointless. Sorry if it came across that way. I was just pointing out that most know that Leopard was universal. It is quite shocking the amount of misinformation on the Internet on the matter. Though, I do recommend people do a fresh install when switching between APM and GUID, but it will work as you demonstrated through cloning.

No offense taken.

I posted this for a couple of reasons-one of which is-as I mentioned-the huge amount of misinformation out there on this subject(although most regulars to this forum know better).

The other is somewhat occupational related. I'm a chemist by training and profession, and as a consequence spend a lot of time reading literature. I constantly have ideas floating around in my head about things that should work but don't when I actually get into the lab and try them(or work in ways that I didn't anticipate. Even though I knew that cloning as I did should work perfectly, I wanted to try it for myself, and my post was partially just to relay my experience that I had done it, and it did in fact work.

 

[poiihy]

You can just use this trick and make it work on all machines.