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Jaguar bootable installer

Project Alice

Project Alice

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jul 13, 2008
2,099
2,181
Post Falls, ID
I’m wanting to add Jaguar to my PPC Mac FW hard disk. It’s currently got both the installers for Tiger and Leopard, as well as full updated installations. I am partitioning it to fit Jaguar as I type this; but what I didn’t think of before doing this was that Jaguar comes on two CDs. To create the other two installers I just cloned their DVD images to the drive. I know I could clone Jaguars first CD and the installer would boot, but how would I get the second disc on the same partition, while making sure the installer knows it doesn’t need to ask for the second disk?
 
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Mind me asking what is so special about Jaguar ? Does anything run on it, or is it just for nostalgia of an older version of Mac OS X ? I never ran OS X Public Beta much less anything before Panther. Even when I got my G4 350 Sawtooth, I was still on OS 9.2.2 and never heard of X back then.
 
Macbookprodude said:
Mind me asking what is so special about Jaguar ? Does anything run on it, or is it just for nostalgia of an older version of Mac OS X ? I never ran OS X Public Beta much less anything before Panther. Even when I got my G4 350 Sawtooth, I was still on OS 9.2.2 and never heard of X back then.
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The only thing better about it is it's classic environment is much better than Panther or Tiger.
I use this external FireWire drive as a bootable drive for Tiger and Leopard, and I thought it'd be cool to have Jaguar on it too. Especially since I can run Jaguar on Macs with very little ram, which makes diagnosing with this drive easier. If I buy a new old mac I can test it out if it doesn't have much ram. OS 9 for whatever reason won't boot off this FW disk, I've tried for months to get it to work and it doesn't; so Jaguar is a good alternative there.

It's also very pretty.
 
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Project Alice said:
The only thing better about it is it's classic environment is much better than Panther or Tiger.
I use this external FireWire drive as a bootable drive for Tiger and Leopard, and I thought it'd be cool to have Jaguar on it too. Especially since I can run Jaguar on Macs with very little ram, which makes diagnosing with this drive easier. If I buy a new old mac I can test it out if it doesn't have much ram. OS 9 for whatever reason won't boot off this FW disk, I've tried for months to get it to work and it doesn't; so Jaguar is a good alternative there.

It's also very pretty.
Click to expand...

I agree, Jaguar is pretty. And thats a good reason as classic runs better on it. I don't use classic, as I can boot into OS 9.2.2 which I have made into a nice platform. I managed to find that a lot of websites are still out there that classila will load with no issues.. even some where it can't find common algorithms it still loads. I wish I can get wikipedia.org to open, however because of TLS thats why - Why does one need TLS anyway for a stupid on-line encarta ??
 
Just an update, I ended up using a second external drive for 10.0-10.3 because my other one wouldn’t resize for some reason.

I used a 10.2.7 installer from a USB 2.0 iMac G4. It didn’t even need modified, it wasn’t blocked from installing on other machines.

I then followed this to stick 10.3’s installer onto one disc. It worked perfectly!

10.0 and 10.1 keep failing installs so I gotta figure that out, but the other two work perfectly.
 
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Project Alice said:
I then followed this to stick 10.3’s installer onto one disc. It worked perfectly!
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Sorry to say this but you could have used a 10.3.7 restore disc (for an early 2005 Mac mini or PowerBook) and modified it to skip the machine check. Newer baseline and a single DVD to begin with. ;)
 
Amethyst1 said:
Sorry to say this but you could have used a 10.3.7 restore disc (for an early 2005 Mac mini or PowerBook) and modified it to skip the machine check. Newer baseline and a single DVD to begin with. ;)
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I was looking for one but couldn’t find one🤦 It’s literally super easy for me to erase that partition and clone that image onto it so I’ll probably do that. Mainly for the fact that 10.3.7 will boot on more Macs than 10.3.0 will.
 
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Project Alice said:
Just an update, I ended up using a second external drive for 10.0-10.3 because my other one wouldn’t resize for some reason.

I used a 10.2.7 installer from a USB 2.0 iMac G4. It didn’t even need modified, it wasn’t blocked from installing on other machines.

I then followed this to stick 10.3’s installer onto one disc. It worked perfectly!

10.0 and 10.1 keep failing installs so I gotta figure that out, but the other two work perfectly.
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Dumb question, but do you think this could be used to try to install the G5 version on unsupported models? I doubt I'd be getting it working on a PoweMac 11,2 but I figure they were targeting the 7,2 then a 7,3 ought to work. It's possible it needs the PowerPC 970, and that the 970FX will somehow not work, but as it stands, the G5 version just won't even try to install on mine, saying it's not supported.
 
repairedCheese said:
Dumb question, but do you think this could be used to try to install the G5 version on unsupported models?
Click to expand...

If you patch the installer to allow installation on unsupported machines, you'll be able to at least try it. The 10.2.8 for G5 kernel has a CPU check and panics if it detects an unsupported CPU though.

www.insanelymac.com

How to patch any Mac OS X Restore DVD (gray disc) to work on any computer

Considering it is such an obstacle, and I have been asked this many times, I think it would be worthwhile for this to finally be written down. This guide requires an existing installation of Mac OS X; for 10.4 and earlier, you can use any OS X release, but for 10.5 and 10.6 you need 10.5 or highe...
www.insanelymac.com
 
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Amethyst1 said:
If you patch the installer to allow installation on unsupported machines, you'll be able to at least try it. The 10.2.8 for G5 kernel has a CPU check and panics if it detects an unsupported CPU though.

www.insanelymac.com

How to patch any Mac OS X Restore DVD (gray disc) to work on any computer

Considering it is such an obstacle, and I have been asked this many times, I think it would be worthwhile for this to finally be written down. This guide requires an existing installation of Mac OS X; for 10.4 and earlier, you can use any OS X release, but for 10.5 and 10.6 you need 10.5 or highe...
www.insanelymac.com
Click to expand...
Figures there's another layer. And of course, the 7,2 is the only G5 with that cpu. You can really feel the future of Apple reaching through those little changes over the course of just a couple years.
 
repairedCheese said:
Figures there's another layer. And of course, the 7,2 is the only G5 with that cpu. You can really feel the future of Apple reaching through those little changes over the course of just a couple years.
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But the thing is - if the 10.2.7 for G5 disc and kernel boots on your 7,3, you might be able to install 10.2.7, run the 10.2.8 update and - hello, Hackintosh! - replace mach_kernel and System.kext (which you'll need to have backed up) with the 10.2.7 versions prior to rebooting. That might give you a near-10.2.8... or just blow up spectacularly. ;)
 
Amethyst1 said:
But the thing is - if the 10.2.7 for G5 disc and kernel boots on your G5, you might be able to install 10.2.7, run the 10.2.8 update and - hello, Hackintosh! - replace mach_kernel and System.kext (which you'll need to have backed up) with the 10.2.7 versions prior to rebooting. That might give you a near-10.2.8... or just blow up spectacularly. ;)
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The G5 10.2.7 install disk does boot enough to tell me my 7,3 isn't supported, in a very vague way of course. But, all the way to the installer, and everything. And if it boots enough to tell me off through an installer, than who knows?

I'm going to have to put some time into this, it sounds worth doing. For all I know, I could be opening a whole new world of PMG5 support. Or a nightmare for anyone who follows in my footsteps. :D

God though, a PMG5 Hackintosh. I love it.
 
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Here's some info from @LightBulbFun that might be useful -

Some PowerMac7,3 models shipped with PowerPC 970 CPUs (not 970FXs) and as such can boot the 10.2.8 G5 build but fan control does not work and as such the fans race to max, my 2Ghz June 2004 is one such model with regular 970s that will happily boot 10.2.8 G5 :)
Click to expand...
 
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Amethyst1 said:
Here's some info from @LightBulbFun that might be useful -
Click to expand...
Now that is a choice. I've heard the G4 MDD get called a wind tunnel, but those people haven't heard a G5 take off. I also have absolutely no way to check off the top of my head, even though I am vnc'ed into the machine right now. Apple kind of really buried the fact that there was a 970 at all involved in this thing, never mind the 3 variants.
 
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Look at the "cpu type" or "processor name" in system profiler. 2.2 is 970, 3.x is 970fx iirc
 
We have ourselves a PowerPC G5 (3.0) which means this is going to be quite the experiment. If it works, I'll be opening a door, otherwise, I'll be sure it was never open at all. Either way, I'll finally have an answer to a particular question I had, ever since I ran into that unsupported system message in the 10.2 installer.

Can I get around it? At least I'll have tried everything.
 
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One thing I forgot is - you better back up the whole /System/Library/Extensions folder from 10.2.7 before updating to 10.2.8 and copying back the two files mentioned above - because 10.2.8 comes with new kexts and some of them might not work with the older kernel, so if you run into kext-related errors you may have to restore the 10.2.7 version of the offenders.

(I weht through this when booting 10.4.4 for Intel using a 10.4.8 kernel - long story - fortunately it was just one or two kexts that wouldn't play ball iirc.)
 
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Given I have put a 4tb drive in the 2nd bay of this machine, and I'll only be giving about 5gb, max, to Jaguar, it's safe to say that basically every step of the way, I'll be backing up that partition with Leopard. Though, that does make me wonder if 10.2 even supported GUID partitioning, I guess I'll find out if I see the non-boot disk if I get Jaguar to boot.

Actually, I'll install it on my firewire CF reader. It's not fast and I only have the one CF card, but firewire has never failed me when I needed to boot. And I don't have to mess with the partitions, either. Not until it's all set up, assuming this works.
 
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