Friend's PowerMac G4. Success

[riccbhard]

Me and one of my friends managed to get his PowerMac G4 running. It was his aunt's and she passed away and it sat for a while. It currently has OS 9.2.2. It's a PowerMac G4 Sawtooth. When we make money over the summer we're going to get Tiger and install on it. Can you upgrade from OS 9 to Tiger?

 

[DeltaMac]

You can't upgrade from OS 9 to Tiger, but you would just install Tiger. The OS 9 system and its folders, etc. will remain as is, and Tiger would just add its folders and files to that.

You do need to make sure that the G4 has at least 256 MB memory (more than 512MB is even better)

 

[riccbhard]

Could I just wipe the drive and install Tiger? Even better, can I boot both?

 

[mrcarson2]

yes you can boot both, you also need to have os9 installed to run classic programs within tiger :_)

 

[riccbhard]

Thanks for the quick replies!

I will dual boot Tiger and OS 9. But for right now it's just OS 9.

 

[bobw]

Before installing OS X, you may need to upgrade the Firmware.

Make sure you do that if needed, otherwise X won't install and you may have a problem booting after trying to install OS X. Check Here for Firmware.

 

[riccbhard]

Thanks, I almost forgot about Firmware upgrades. I'll see if it requires one.

 

[Darkshadow]

And just to help you out: I have a G4 Sawtooth that I use with OS X. I can't tell you how it'll work with Tiger, as I bought a 1.4GHz processor upgrade for it, but I can tell you it ran 10.3 pretty well. Hmm, though I also have 1 GB of RAM installed, so I'm sure that helped me out a bit as well.