PowerBook G4 DVD drive issue installing Leopard

[michaelsanford]

I'm installing Leopard on my stepsister's PowerBook G4 (I am booting and can't acquire any more hardware details at the moment) but am encountering a problem.

After a drop or two in its history, the DVD drive seems to be seeking back and forth forever. It's been at the purple boot screen for about 10 minutes now with the same behaviour, beachball and all (which responds to trackpad input).

Incidentally, I booted by running the Installer app from inside the DVD.

Any suggestions? I have an iBook G4 with Leopard (and CD/DVD Sharing enabled). I had the following ideas in mind, let me know if any will work, or feel free to suggest another:
1. Try to remote install MacOS (à la MacBook Air, if that's possible);
2. Mount the PowerBook in firewire target disk mode and install it on the mounted volume (surely this will cause problems somewhere after booting);
3. Do something with Apple Remote Desktop (Hail Mary).

TIA

PS I'm trying everything I can think of to avoid purchasing a bootable external DVD drive, but if that's the only reasonable solution, I'll have to get cracking and find one.

Update 1 – It is not possible to use the Remote Install MacOS X Utility to install Leopard onto a PowerBook G4, it seems, as the network drive (i.e., MacOS X Install DVD) does not appear in the startup disk selection. And I thought MacOS X could do network boot by default. I wonder if there's some kind of "is this a MacBook Air? No. Ok, don't let on that we have an install DVD inserted" going on...

[michaelsanford]

Oh, well look at that. Turns out there PowerBook only has 256 megs of physical memory. See, I *should* have checked that first, but you would think that the Installer utility would check that for you, wouldn't you?

(It also never occurred to me that a PowerBook would have no RAM expansion...sheesh.)

If the install fails for some reason, I'll continue the narrative, otherwise, it probably went just fine.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

All PowerBook G4s have two RAM slots and are both user-upgradable. What makes you think that her PowerBook G4 cannot accept more RAM?

Suggestion: grab an external FireWire drive, and use Carbon Copy Cloner (or Apple's Disk Utility) to simply clone the Install DVD to that drive, then boot the PowerBook G4 from that disk drive. Works like a charm. Make sure you use the APM partition scheme so that the PowerBook G4 can boot from it... older PowerPC computers can't boot from drives formatted with the GUID partition scheme, which is what's used on the newer Intel-based Macs.

[michaelsanford]

Sorry, I didn't mean that it couldn't accept more RAM, but rather that it hadn't occurred to me that "someone would buy a PowerBook and not expand the RAM from the base of 256 megs at time of purchase". I mean, it's a powerbook...

In any event, the problem was the Leopard requires 512 megs of physical memory, and this PowerBook only has 256, which caused the installer to (silently) fail.

Thanks for the tip, though!

[bigkdomino]

Does anyone know how I would use the open firware method to install leopard on appc g4 from an external dvd drive, ive done it b4 but i can't find out how to do it now