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Upgrading HDD & Leopard. HELP!

I

itou

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 16, 2008
222
0
This is on a PowerBook G4 1.33ghz. I just maxed the RAM today to 2GB and plan to upgrade the HDD to one I already bought (250GB) and Leopard. I have encountered a few problems.

1. I didn't bring the Leopard DVD (original) as I didn't want to carry it with me to in my carry-on luggage (the laptop is with my fiancee in Japan). I made an image of it and have it on my iPod. The iPod is USB connected (not firewire). I didn't know I had to restart to install Leopard and now it doesn't work!

2. Should I buy an external case for the new HDD and clone the contents of my existing drive to that? It would be easiest to do that, but I'd be spending money for an external case and won't solve the problem of installing Leopard?

I don't know what to do. I want to avoid buying an external HDD case. Anyway to do this efficiently?

Thanks.
 
Burn a DVD of Leopard from the disc image. And you can start up from that. I'm not sure if Leopard is dual layer though and if so, your Powerbook won't be able to burn that kind of DVD. But maybe you can find an Intel Mac to do it (you could also copy the contents of your HDD via target disc mode to the 2nd Mac). Is there an Apple Store convenient to you? They've let me use their Macs to copy files from my dead iBook G3 or .Mac account in the past and burn contents on my CDs/DVDs.
 
You can boot from a usb drive in most PPC macs, but that doesn't quite help you. You can't boot from an iPod anyway because it stinks.

You can't burn the dvd with your mac be cause its a DL-DVD. And I take it you've already initiated the installer and your mac is unbootable. That's ok, we'll work with that.

You're in Japan, right? You need at least an 8GB drive for this all to work right. So grab eleventy billion yen and buy a cheap 8GB+ usb drive, and find a Mac. Any mac will do; use the one in the store, borrow one from a guy sleeping on the subway on the way to work, whatever. Fire up Disk Utility, and plug in your iPod and the flash drive. If the flash drive came with Hello Kitty software, delete any partitions on the flash drive. Highlight whatever new partition its now created, and hit the restore tab. Select the Leopard .dmg as your source, and the usb drive as the destination, and hit the restore button toward the lower right. Then wait it out. Get a coffee or go see a massage therapist and get a handy while the mac does its work.

Ok, so you have a USB drive with Leopard on it. Now what? Take that all the way over to the PPC mac awaiting its new OS, and stick it in the hole. Now, you might like to install that new hard drive somewhere between now and this step, so go ahead and do that before you stick it in, then stick it in later. After having stuck it in numerous times, you will want to turn on your mac, and hold down the OPTION key. This should load the boot drive selector menu. You should see on the left, your primary internal drive. On the right, your USB drive, labeled Leopard Install, or something like that. If you don't see this, panic. You've done all this for nothing. Aside from the handy anyway. But, should you see that icon for boot to Leopard install, or Leopard CD, or whatever, select it, and hit enter/return.

Much joy and celebration will be had when you see the Leopard installer function and ask you where to install the OS. But where should it all go? You're not likely to see anything because there is a new disc in the place where your mac's old familiar disc used to be. Up in the Menu bar, there's a Utilities menu, and on that menu is the Disk Utility. Click on the Disk Utility, and once it loads select the primary hard disc, and format it HFS+Journaled. Once that's all done, select that drive as where you'd like Leopard to go, get it all started, and promptly ignore it for about a half hour. Now would be a good time to get some snacks, or another massage if you enjoyed yourself earlier. Come on back when you're done, follow the prompts, and smile.
 
wow! thanks for the quick replies!

i've tried opening disk utility and creating a partition on my ipod (which erased the entire thing btw!!) and whilst it let me choose the source (i've placed it on my desktop before i partitioned it, thank god!) it wouldn't let me restore (the "restore" button is grey).

what's wrong? i can't use the ipod? i must use a flash drive?
i also don't have another mac here. it's just this one. leopard didn't install. as soon as it restarted, the disc image was on my desktop so it just booted back to tiger.
 
drichards said:
Nope, you can't use the iPod, unless theres new magic tricks I don't know about, iPods still suck at being boot devices.

<edit>Engadget suggests there are indeed old magic tricks I don't know about and you might go read that article.
Click to expand...

thanks for the link.
i'm not looking to use the ipod as a bootable drive, but just a means of installing leopard. i wanted to put leopard into the iPod and install from that into the powerbook's HDD. that's not possible it looks?
 
It has to be a bootable drive to boot the Leopard installer. Whatever drive you use, you have to restore the Leopard .dmg onto the desired drive, then boot the PPC mac from that drive.

Or did this work out already?
 
drichards said:
It has to be a bootable drive to boot the Leopard installer. Whatever drive you use, you have to restore the Leopard .dmg onto the desired drive, then boot the PPC mac from that drive.

Or did this work out already?
Click to expand...

so my only choice is to get an external drive (firewire, not USB) and then put leopard on it, make it bootable and install?
 
USB is supposed to be bootable on G4 macs, from further poking around I did earlier. You just have to restore the dmg onto the target usb/firewire disk and select it at boot. It has to be at least 8GB.
 
drichards said:
USB is supposed to be bootable on G4 macs, from further poking around I did earlier. You just have to restore the dmg onto the target usb/firewire disk and select it at boot. It has to be at least 8GB.
Click to expand...

that's what i thought. i did that, formatted the ipod, and tried to put the image on the ipod by way of using disk utility: restore. it would allow me to select the leopard image (now on my desktop) but the button for "restore" would be grey. what is the problem??
 
why not just buy an usb/firewire enclosure which im sure you can find relative cheap in japan but your old hd in there... boot from that.. install leopard on new hd.. and then you have an new external drive with your data.... not like your wasting you money as you will now have a time machine drive...
 
MSD401 said:
why not just buy an usb/firewire enclosure which im sure you can find relative cheap in japan but your old hd in there... boot from that.. install leopard on new hd.. and then you have an new external drive with your data.... not like your wasting you money as you will now have a time machine drive...
Click to expand...

i've heard that the powerpc computers cannot boot off a USB drive? is that true?
 
itou said:
i've heard that the powerpc computers cannot boot off a USB drive? is that true?
Click to expand...

Yes. Power PC computers can only boot from FireWire (excluding very early Power Mac G3 models).

All intel computers can boot from USB, however.
 
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