I recently was given an 15 inch iMac G4 with 256 MB RAM and 800 MHz processor and was running OS X 10.3.9. I upgraded the RAM to 512 MB and installed Leopard using a firewire connection with my MacBook. I can boot from the MacBook Leopard but the iMac will not boot or seem to find the Hard Drive. I can see the Hard Drive on my MacBook with Leopard installed on it. All I get on my iMac is a "finder" with a question mark. Is there any suggestions or tips about how I can get my iMac to run properly using Leopard????
installing leopard on imac g4
- Thread starter jrlv86
- Start date
The installation trick you used to install Leopard on hardware that isn't supported by it would have worked if BOTH machines were PowerPC based. However, since your MacBook is Intel based, it sounds like the installer has installed the Intel content of the OS on your PowerPC iMac, which can't run on that architecture. Either that, or you installed Leopard from the Grey, hardware specific OS discs which came with your MacBook – this is a custom build of Leopard that can ONLY install on your MacBook, nothing else.
earthsaver
Ben R.
On top of that, and especially on a slower Mac, 512MB of memory won't do. You may even suffer slowness as the max RAM on your iMac is only 1GB.