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TICKET ARCHIVE -> How 2 install Leopard on Blueberry iMac?

ken_ww - Feb 24, 2008 - 4:34 am

I've got a Blueberry G3 iMac running Panther (10.3.9) with a non-Apple replacement internal optical drive and want to install Leopard on it. Both are running Panther (10.3.9). The Leopard DVD is unreadable on the iMac's optical drive.

I mounted it on my Dual 1GHz G4 Power Mac running 10.3.9, with file sharing turned on and mounted the volume over the network using the iMac, but upon starting the installer, a messages was displayed saying that the drive can't be used to install onto the computer.

After doing some searching on the internet, I learned that the proper way is to use NetInstall, which is included in MacOS X Server, and requires bootpd, httpd and tftp services. I don't have any MacOS X Server installed, but have httpd up and running fine (except that the autoload on boot is somehow blocked by setting up httpd.conf with SSL site certificates, forcing me to manually start httpd every time I restart the machine, but that's another topic).

I tried following the directions on to set up bootpd on the Dual G4, but got only as far as "service com.apple.portmap start" before running into a brick wall. The message "No such service com.apple.portmap" appears. So far, all the information I've found about portmap service on 10.3.9 is scant and looks very tedious and potentially downright dangerous.

Taking a big step backwards to see if I'm going at this all wrong, or beating my head against the wall, I figured I needed to check my other options before committing to something so complicated as setting up a netboot server for a single install. On the other hand, once the NetBoot server is set up, I could continue to use that method to upgrade the system on the iMac as new versions come out. Of course, the Dual G4 will also eventually need to be upgraded some day and from what I hear, NetBoot is not a part of Leopard. If that's true, even the NetBoot solution is only temporary, but I would hope NetInstall becomes simpler to setup rather than more difficult.

Alternatively, I've read about linking two laptops with a FireWire cable and using one as an external hard drive for the other, but have found a number of indications that isn't all that stable and I don't know if that would work with desktop Macs at all.

I've got a 200Gb LaCie external firewire drive that is advertized as being fully MacOS X compatible, and a Dual G4 1GHz (mirrored bezel) Power Macintosh, so I figured perhaps I could install onto a partition of the firewire drive and boot the iMac from that in order to install, but I don't know if that would work either, since it appears to me that the machine would have to already have loaded the kernel and any firewire (i/o) related daemons in order to access the drive to boot from it, creating a chicken-and-egg conundrum.

Can anyone help me through this? I need to know which of the three ways (NetInstall, FireWire cable link or Firewire external disk boot) is simplest and most reliable, and the steps to take to complete the installation on the iMac using what I have, or can download and use for free or very inexpensively.

Also, the Leopard DVD's accompanying manual only speaks of upgrading, rather than clean installing, so I don't know if there are two different installation DVD's, one for upgrade and another for clean installs, or if this DVD covers both scenarios. Anyone care to clarify that?

earthsaver - Feb 24, 2008 - 10:55 am

You really won't get anywhere with any of these install scenarios. Have you read the system requirements of Leopard. There's no chance of running Leopard smoothly on an iMac that old. If XPost Facto version 5 existed, this might be possible, but I would highly discourage it. I wouldn't recommend going further than Tiger.

That said, the easiest route would be to restore the Leopard Install DVD to an external FireWire disk, startup from that disk connected to the destination Mac, and install.

- Ben

Serenak - Feb 24, 2008 - 10:56 am

Ken

Thanks for coming to macosx.com and I will try to help you.

There is a very short answer to this problem - and that is that you cannot install Leopard on the G3 iMac by any means... it officially requires a G4 867MHz Mac or better

Leopard DVDs come in 2 flavours as it were - upgrade ones that require the presence of a previous OS in order to run and the "Full Retail" ones that can install straight on to a clean HDD - Actually I suspect the "Upgrade" one can be hacked to do a full install as it is perfectly capable of doing a "wipe and install"

Hope that helps.