Can I firewire Tiger from another mac?

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BriC

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Hi. The DVD Player in my powerbook is broken (doesnt recognise DVD's) it does however recognise Cd's. If I was to buy Tiger, could I use my friends Powerbook to install it/firewire it onto my mac??

If so EXACTLY how do I do it??
 
You should be able to connect it to your friend Powerbook via firewire and boot it into Tagte disk mode (Hold down the T key when you boot) and then install it to the firewire drive.
 
I tried to do this at work. The teacher purchased copies of Tiger for all her Macs, but one of them only has a CD-ROM drive while the other one has a DVD-RAM (both are Power Mac G4 systems). I used one of her G4 iBooks in Target Disk Mode (which requires a special Firewire cable) to see if I could boot up from the DVD-ROM drive in the iBook, but to no avail. It did load the hard drive and DVD once the Power Mac booted up to Panther, but I couldn't install Tiger since it needed to reboot and start from the disc.

Searching around on Google hasn't brought anything up as far as solutions. The next thing I'm going to try today is to remove the DVD-RAM from the one Power Mac G4 and install it on the one with the CD-ROM drive, that way it can boot from the DVD-RAM drive with the Tiger disc. However, since you are using a PowerBook and the DVD-ROM inside it might be hard to replace just for the quick install, I'm not sure. As you see, I couldn't get it to boot with the other computer in Target Disk Mode.

I would say try and share the optical drive from another computer on a small network, but you would still encounter the issue of having the installation begin during bootup, meaning it would have to see the network before anything and recognize the share.

Is there anyway you could actually have that PowerBook's DVD-ROM drive serviced in order to perform the upgrade?
 
I have had no problem doing it this way, in fact I installed Tiger on an XServ via a POwerbook as it has no video card in it. It might be the fact that you have a DVD-RAM rather than ROM drive that is the issue. I have a couple of old G4s doing nothing much at the moment I'll try it on them and report back.
 
Tommo said:
I have had no problem doing it this way, in fact I installed Tiger on an XServ via a POwerbook as it has no video card in it. It might be the fact that you have a DVD-RAM rather than ROM drive that is the issue. I have a couple of old G4s doing nothing much at the moment I'll try it on them and report back.
Click to expand...
Thanks for all your advice much appreciated.

I want to try it from a G4Powerbook (with working DVD Drive) and firewire Tiger to my G4 Powerbook (broken DVD Drive). Do you think this will be possible???

Cheers
 
' I used one of her G4 iBooks in Target Disk Mode (which requires a special Firewire cable) to see if I could boot up from the DVD-ROM drive in the iBook, but to no avail.' - a 'special' FireWire cable? As opposed to the standard 6 pin or 4 pin connector FireWire cables?
 
Yes. Connect the two computers with a FireWire cable. Start your machine up and hold down 'T' until you see a FireWire symbol on the screen. Then start the other PowerBook up from the Mac OS X Install DVD. Go through the standard install motions, and select the FireWire PowerBook's hard drive as the destination for installation.
 
Tommo said:
I have had no problem doing it this way, in fact I installed Tiger on an XServ via a POwerbook as it has no video card in it. It might be the fact that you have a DVD-RAM rather than ROM drive that is the issue. I have a couple of old G4s doing nothing much at the moment I'll try it on them and report back.
Click to expand...

Well, I wasn't using the G4 with the DVD-RAM. I was using an iBook that had a DVD-ROM drive and set that to Target Disk Mode and the Tiger install disc in it. The Mac I was trying to get it installed to was the Power Mac G4 with the CD-ROM drive.

What I realized now is that I was probably doing this bass-ackwards. :p I should have had the G4 go into Target Disk Mode and the iBook booted off of the install disc. However, this particular Power Mac G4 doesn't support Target Disc Mode since it's one of the first models (graphite ribbed color casing, not the silver casing).

My only other option would be move the DVD-RAM temporarily from the one G4 to the other G4 with the CD-ROM drive. But that is for another time. :D

Thanks all. :)
 
'However, this particular Power Mac G4 doesn't support Target Disc Mode since it's one of the first models (graphite ribbed color casing, not the silver casing).' - the case style nor color are what determines whether a PowerMac G4 boots into Target Mode, or not.

Only one model - the PowerMac G4 (PCI Graphics) - the very first PowerMac G4 model only, may not boot in Target Mode. All remaining (graphite ribbed color case) PowerMac G4 models since [PowerMac G4 (Gigabit Ethernet), (AGP Graphics), Cube, and (Digital Audio)] do boot in Target Mode.
 
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