Installing Leopard with dead DVD drive

[carmina]

Hi there - first post on this forum, I really appreciate any help at all. I've googled and searched and tried so many things. I'm coming up on my wits end here!

OK! Backstory. Have an iMac and a macbook (specs in my sig). The iMac has a dead DVD drive, I have a lacie external DVD drive for it now. Can't load Leopard from external drive. I load a disc image of the Leopard install onto an external harddrive (usb not firewire) - no workie. I partitioned the drive on my laptop thinking I can use this computer to boot from via the firewire. First I installed Leopard on the laptop (wish I hadn't done that now!) - and now I can't get the computers to see each other. When I restart T (on either computer) the drive/disc won't pop up on the other.

What do I do? I can't find anything on the net regarding problems with tiger and leopard OS's not seeing each other.

Please help! I'm not a computer genius, so please forgive me if I seem dumb!


Carla

 

[HLdan]

I'm not fully understanding your situation, why can't you install Leopard using the external DVD drive? It should work.

 

[ichabodkky]

If you have an external DVD drive, AND the physical Leopard DVD, reboot the computer with the external dvd drive plugged in with the leopard dvd in it and hold down the option key. It will give you a choice of which drive you want to boot into.

 

[Consultant]

You need to buy Leopard, use the black disk.

Gray disks are computer specific.

 

[carmina]

Oh my gosh.

The solution to the problem was/is embarrassing. I'd rather not say, but it is fixed and Leopard is installed.

It went straight from the disc on the laptop and onto my iMac. Now I am confused as to why it only upgraded and didn't wipe my drive. Options never came up.

 

[Lynxpro]

Oh my gosh.
The solution to the problem was/is embarrassing. I'd rather not say, but it is fixed and Leopard is installed.
It went straight from the disc on the laptop and onto my iMac. Now I am confused as to why it only upgraded and didn't wipe my drive. Options never came up.

I was under the impression that Leopard wouldn't wipe a drive if it had previously had Tiger on it. It certainly will wipe the drive if the machine was running Panther before.

 

[sickmacdoc]

Oh my gosh.

The solution to the problem was/is embarrassing. I'd rather not say, but it is fixed and Leopard is installed.

It went straight from the disc on the laptop and onto my iMac. Now I am confused as to why it only upgraded and didn't wipe my drive. Options never came up.

When any previous version of OSX exists on the drive that Leopard is being installed onto, the default choice for installation is the "Upgrade" method.

You just missed where the method is changed- which is easy to miss as it is not obvious by any means. When you get to the screen that shows you the window of eligible drives (even if there is only one BTW), there is a button at the lower left marked "Options". If that is clicked you are presented with the choices to install via. Below is an example of that screen (although mine shows Erase and Install selected because I took this screenshot for another post, the default is the top one-- Upgrade Mac OS X). After you make your selection there and press OK, the installation proceeds to the next step (the summary step in which you can press the "Customize" button at the bottom if you want to leave off particular languages, etc.).