Here is a quick tutorial for anyone with an ancient Apple G3 Blue & White Powermac looking to install an OS via DVD. Basically, these machines are some of the first to have Firewire ports on them, the caveat is that they are plugged into the motherboard using a small daughter card. This allows them to be used in the OS normally but makes booting with the or using them for target disk mode impossible.
My first thought after discovering that was to install a generic DVD drive in the mac and use that but the drives on had on hand did not immediately work. This could be for any reason, and in hind sight I should have done more work on getting the drive to work before abandoning it. It is likely I screwed up the jumpers settings or didn’t fully plug in the IDE cable. Truth be told though it was late at night and I didn’t feel like going to the store to by more blank DVDs so I was looking for a workaround anyway. What I did have on hand though were spare hard disks and if you’ve ever been to the Apple Genius Bar you have seen the apple techs install the OS from a hard disk and not CD or DVD. This, in my mind, meant that you could use any drive for the installation.
Understand that we are going to be erasing all data on a hard drive. Use a spare drive, or an old drive. Do not use a drive that has data on it you want. It will be erased!
Step one is to have or create a iso or dmg image of the OS you want to install and enough free space on the computer to hold it. I’m not going to get to into how to do this, there are a million ways. Here is a simple way that I like to use from the command line. Basically, copy the command into the terminal and replace pickaname.iso with the the name you want the ISO image called. I usually do something like Tiger.iso. I would recommend you not use spaces in the name at the command line, if you want the file name to have spaces in it, put them in later. Replace /Volumes/DVDname with the name of the disc you are ripping. Tab complete is your friend. Look at you desktop for the name of the CD and then at the command line type /V (press tab) and then enter the first letter of the disc’s name and press tab again. It will fill in the blanks for you.
hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -o pickaname.iso /Volumes/DVDname
Ok, now onto the fun part. Now that you have this ISO we need to put it onto a hard drive in such a way that the drive can boot from it. Grab a spare HD that you have kicking around. I used on of the 6GB drives that was in another of the G3’s I have sitting around and put it into the system. It’s pretty simple to do on a mac as the insides are nice and clean but you need to be aware of jumper settings and the like. I put the drive in where the CD drive had been. This is only a temporary swap. If you have no idea how to install a hard drive do some google’ing. It’s pretty straight forward though so you may want to just carefully open the case up and see if you can figure it out. Make sure the computer is powered off.
Once the disk is in, boot the machine back up and launch Disk Utility, it’s in the Utilities folder inside Applications. Find the spare disk in the list and ‘Erase’ it using the Mac journaled file system.
Now, drag that newly made ISO image into the Disk utility window, it will join the list of disks on the left side.
Select that freshly erased disk and click the Restore button.
Drag the ISO image onto the source field and drag the clean disk on the destination field.
Make sure the ‘Erase Destination’ check box is unchecked. Don’t ask me why but if you tell it to Erase the disk first the process will fail. That is why we had to do the erase seperately. Click the ‘Restore’ button and wait for the process to finish.
Now, you are all set. Reboot the Mac and hold down Option+Command+Shift+Delete and the OS X install will launch and you can install the OS normally. One of the fringe benefits is that the install will happen a lot faster this way then from a CD or DVD.
When I first did this I thought I was going to have to ‘Bless’ the drive. That is the command used to make a disk bootable by a Mac but as it turns out that is not necessary. It will boot it fine without the command.
Once the install is done the Mac will boot into the new OS and you can swap the CD drive for the hard drive and put the system back to normal. The hard disk that you used to install from can be kept for future use or erased and setup as a regular hard disk again.
Wasn’t that fun?
Topslakr