Installing Leopard on 12" G4 PB with dead optical drive?

[Ahheck01]

Clearly we need to boot from an external hard drive of some sort, but we don't currently have the ability to do that. I have the disc, but his optical drive is shot. Is there a way to boot from my optical drive onto his computer? Or if I make a disk image on my computer, can I somehow boot from that disk image?

Looking for ideas!

-Evan

 

[GoCubsGo]

You can make a disk image on a flash drive (needed 8 gb or more) and then boot from that.

 

[angemon89]

Yeah, what jessica said. This is the method that I use:

-Find a Mac with a working disc drive
-Put the Leopard disc in
-Open Disk Utility
-Click on the Leopard disc on the left hand side
-File > New > Disk Image from "Mac OS X Install DVD"
-Image format should be DVD/CD Master, Compression: none
-Once that's done take a flash drive, external drive or something else with at least 8GB of free space. Format it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with GUID partion table.
-In disk utility click the Restore tab.
-Set the source to the Mac OS X Install DVD.cdr
-Destination is the flash drive/hard drive
-Click restore

Then you can use that flash/hard drive to install Leopard.

 

[machspeed5]

You can make a disk image on a flash drive (needed 8 gb or more) and then boot from that.

i think only intel machines support booting up from a USB stick

 

[Ahheck01]

i think only intel machines support booting up from a USB stick

Is this true? Will I not be able to boot via USB drive (thumb drive or external usb drive) on the G4 12"?

-Evan

 

[angemon89]

I am not 100% sure.

I read this article thinking you could, but then if you scroll down read reply #5.... So, maybe not? lol

 

[Dreamail]

FireWire Target Disk Mode

If you have access to another Mac, why don't you put the PB into target disk mode (reboot holding the T button).
This will turn the PB into an external FireWire drive.

Hook it up to your other Mac via FireWire and on that other Mac install Leopard onto the 'external drive' (i.e. your PowerBook).


Side note:
I have a 1.33GHz PowerBook 12" with 1.25GB RAM and had Leopard installed on it.
But I downgraded to Tiger as Leopard was too slow. Just above the 'annoying' level.
Tiger is much snappier.

Is there a reason you must install Leopard on it? I'd go for Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) instead.