PowerBook G4 OSX 10.5.8 Install Trouble

[RageCandyBar]

Hello everyone,

I seem to have gotten myself into quite a pickle here and am in need of some advice. I own a 15" PowerBook G4 1GHZ with 1GB ram and a 60GB HDD. It runs fine but is only running tiger and i would like to restore it using a leopard dmg file that I have. I only have 4.7GB CD-RW discs and they are not large enough for such an install and the powerbook, as far as I know, cannot boot off of a usb drive (Maybe OF?). I have an abundace of discs and flash drives that I can use but I cant find a dmg small enough to use! I was thinking of partitioning the drive into two partitions and restoreing the dmg onto the other partition but Im not really sure how to do that. Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance!

 

[gavinstubbs09]

You have two options. Go find a 4.7GB single layer DVD of leopard (usually removes stuff like Xcode and Languages/Printer drivers) 'somewhere on the internet' or split your HDD into 2 (I think you actually need Leopard to do this, I can't recall, if this is out of the question if you have another mac TDM the PBG4 to another Mac and split the drive on the second mac) and have like 10GB for the leopard DMG and the rest for your OS and whatnot.

 

[DeltaMac]

Another option - if you have an external Firewire hard drive.
Restore the Leopard image, using Disk Utility, to an 8GB or larger partition on the external. Boot to that partition, and upgrade your Tiger system.
The hard drive installer makes a significantly faster install, and you won't have the challenge of an older DVD-ROM that may not read that Leopard DVD very reliably.

I'm curious which PowerBook you have, as there were two different generations of 15-inch PowerBoot G4 1GHz - Aluminum, and the older Titanium G4. I've got one of the Ti G4 here in front of me. Still my favorite, although it really shows its age with USB 1 ports, and a really-tiny trackpad.

 

[eyoungren]

There's also this. Booting from USB is possible, you just need to do it from Open Firmware as you surmised.

I've booted my 17" PowerBook off a micro SD card inside my WinMo HTC Touch Pro before (connected to my PowerBook via USB 1.1) following these instructions, so I can confirm it works.

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Another option - if you have an external Firewire hard drive.
Restore the Leopard image, using Disk Utility, to an 8GB or larger partition on the external. Boot to that partition, and upgrade your Tiger system.
The hard drive installer makes a significantly faster install, and you won't have the challenge of an older DVD-ROM that may not read that Leopard DVD very reliably.

I'm curious which PowerBook you have, as there were two different generations of 15-inch PowerBoot G4 1GHz - Aluminum, and the older Titanium G4. I've got one of the Ti G4 here in front of me. Still my favorite, although it really shows its age with USB 1 ports, and a really-tiny trackpad.

My son has the A1025 (BTW, I'm not the OP, just responding to your question even though it was not directed to me) 1 Ghz with 1GB ram. He has Leopard on it and it's a rocket. Cost me $25 (eBay, business liquidation firm) and it's been a damn fine machine.

You can get a USB 2.0 PC card for it. My 1Ghz 17" AlBook has the old 1.1 USB ports, so this is what I did to get USB 2.0 on it. Also, there's Sidetrack for the trackpad, so at least you can get some sort of fingerscrolling out of the trackpad. I think the bus is too old for iScroll 2.