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Open Firmware question...

Z

ziggyonice

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Mar 12, 2006
2,385
1
I have a Power Mac G4 with a dead optical drive. I'm attempting an upgrade to Leopard via Firewire target disk mode. During this process, Open Firmware starts up...

Does anyone know the command for Open Firmware to allow me to boot the Leopard install disc via the target disk mode? I know the command for booting from the optical drive, but obviously that doesn't help as the drive is broken.

Any help would be great. Thanks.
 
Edit: oops wrong link :eek:

I was thinking of faking out the Leopard installer for below 867mhz CPU's

Can't think of an answer to your problem

Do you mean holding 'T' while booting into target disk mode. That is all you should need to make your G4 act as a Firewire hard drive.
 
Nermal said:
If I recall correctly, it'll show up if you hold Option at the chime.
Click to expand...

True, but as I am putting Leopard on an older G4, I have to go through Open Firmware for it to install. I suppose I should look at just getting a new optical drive...
 
Do you have a newer Mac that is Leopard compatible?

If so why not just boot the G4 into target disk mode the usual way by holding the 'T' key. They plug it into the newer mac via Firewire. Then boot that newer Mac off the Leopard DVD and install Leopard onto the G4's hard drive. Since it is only being seen as an external. That or clone via SuperDuper! if the newer Mac already has Leopard installed.

I used the Target Disk Mode installer method before on an older G3 iMac that was not compatible with Tiger and everything worked well.
 
velocityg4 said:
Do you have a newer Mac that is Leopard compatible?

If so why not just boot the G4 into target disk mode the usual way by holding the 'T' key. They plug it into the newer mac via Firewire. Then boot that newer Mac off the Leopard DVD and install Leopard onto the G4's hard drive. Since it is only being seen as an external. That or clone via SuperDuper! if the newer Mac already has Leopard installed.

I used the Target Disk Mode installer method before on an older G3 iMac that was not compatible with Tiger and everything worked well.
Click to expand...

Hmm... I'll try that. Posting results shortly...
 
velocityg4 said:
Do you have a newer Mac that is Leopard compatible?

If so why not just boot the G4 into target disk mode the usual way by holding the 'T' key. They plug it into the newer mac via Firewire. Then boot that newer Mac off the Leopard DVD and install Leopard onto the G4's hard drive. Since it is only being seen as an external. That or clone via SuperDuper! if the newer Mac already has Leopard installed.

I used the Target Disk Mode installer method before on an older G3 iMac that was not compatible with Tiger and everything worked well.
Click to expand...

Okay, so what you suggested won't work *exactly*, but it did get me thinking to another possibility. The problem is that the Leopard disc determines whether you're running it from a Intel based or PowerPC based Mac. So even though I wanted to install it to a PowerPC based Mac, it wouldn't let me as I was running the disc from my MBP (which is Intel based).

The issue here is that I *could* install it, but only if I changed the partition map of the Power Mac's drive to GUID. This would allow the install (as Firewire target mode simply sees it as an external drive), but PowerPC based Macs can't boot from a GUID partition. If I had a Leopard-capable PowerPC based Mac lying around, this would be possible. But as I do not, I thought of an alternative.

Here's a blog post I found which explained how I could do this. I need to clone the drive and restore it from the cloned image... Which should get it working. So the cloning part of your post certainly helped! But I'm trying it right now to see how it goes...
 
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