Install Leopard on Quicksilver PowerMac G4
I recently acquired a PowerMac G4 (800MHz, 768MB RAM, CDRW) and I want to use it as my computer at home. It runs Tiger just fine, but I wanted to put Leopard on it.
Attempt #1: External Hard Drive
Since the PowerMac doesn’t have a DVD drive, I naturally can’t use the Retail DVD to install Leopard. So I used SuperDuper to make a bootable copy of the DVD onto a external hard drive (and doing so would allow me to modify a installer config file that specific the Minimum CPU requirement). There is just one problem with this method: The PowerMac G4 wont boot from USB external hard drive — only Firewire ones — and I don’t have a Firewire external hard drive.
Attempt #2: Target Disk
After a bit of googling, I found that many people have been able to install Leopard onto old machines by booting into target disk mode first. So I did that, and the installation went fine — except the PowerMac won’t boot afterward. It turned out that I used a Intel Mac Mini to perform the installation and the installer partitioned the hard drive of the target-disked PowerMac into GUID partitions. That’s no good: PPC Macs can only boot from APM partitions!
Attempt #3: SuperDuper
My last — and successful — attempt is simply to make a Bootable copy of the PowerMac G4’s hard drive content (which contains freshly installed Leopard) onto a disk image file, repartition the PowerMac’s hard drive into APM partitions, then restore the content of the drive from the disk image.
Ta-da ~~~ Leopard on Quicksilver PowerMac G4!
