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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Installing Os X Panther On New Hard Drives

rockstars2k - Apr 18, 2005 - 2:22 am

Hello,
I recently bought a MAC G4 Dual 450 from a friend. When I bought it from him it only had a 20G hard drive installed and I am already using over 50% of that hard drive. I have an external firewire attached drive that is 160G and I have transferred all the MAC OS X software my friend gave me when I bought the computer from him. I also have a firewire attached Plextor DVD burner. Now that I have bored you with the hardware here is my question.

I have 2 40G hard drives that I would like to install in the G4 and then reinstall OS X Panther. I have the 3 Panther install .dmg files and also the Xcode.dmg file as well. I mounted the dmg files and then burned them to CD with toast and then put the disk in the internal DVD player in the G4. I then rebooted, but I didn't get to the screen to let me format and install my disks like I would with my Linux, Windows or Solaris system. Can you please help me out on how I need to burn the .dmg install disks and then how to get the machine to boot so I can install Panther to my 2 new 40G hard drives.

I tried burning a toast file, mac volume and also just dragging the files from the mounted dmg file into toast, but nothing seems to work. I can do this with my eyes closed on Linux, Windows or Solaris, but MAC is kicking my behind.

Thank you VERY much in advance for your help, I truly appreciate it.

Lastly, another reason I would like to know how to do this is for when I get Tiger I want to be able to burn backup copies of my disks, also copy the contents to my external drive so I can install software from there, etc, etc.....

Again, thank you for you help and have a GREAT DAY!! I look forward to hearing from you.

Michael Planck
Systems Engineer- Disaster Recovery/Data Storage

rockstars2k - Apr 18, 2005 - 2:31 am

I would also like to clarify something for you. The reason I got this MAC and all the software from my friend is he bought a 64bit G5 and sold me this as a complete package. I did NOT steal the software and am a happy new MAC user. It is very similar to Linux which I use mostly, but still very different also.

I look forward to buying a G5 later this year and have already pre-purchased OS X Tiger and am eagerly waiting for that.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Michael Planck

DeltaMac - Apr 18, 2005 - 9:58 am

Toast works great, and I use it all the time to create backup installer CDs (making one-to-one copies of disks directly), but I have had very poor luck in using an existing .dmg file to create an OS X installer CD/DVD that will actually boot, although there is probably a method to do this, I have not been lucky enough to find it. When you try to boot to an installer CD for Mac OS X, you should see a 'Select Language' screen. Do you ever see that, or exactly what happens when you try to boot to the installer CD that you have burned?
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rockstars2k - Apr 18, 2005 - 12:27 pm

It just boots to my regular MAC log in. I have put back in the 20G HD for now so that my make will at least work and figured if I got the CD right and it actually booted, then I would shut the machine down and put in my 40G hard drives and do the install........I don't get it though, this is easy in Linux, and Windows to burn bootable CD's. I also bought a MAC book at Borders and it says I am supposed to hold down the C key when I am booting, is that correct?

I wish I could figure this out though as I truly enjoy this MAC, but making a bootable CD is a pain in the rear. I look forward to your reply, thank you and have a great day!!

Michael Planck

DeltaMac - Apr 18, 2005 - 4:59 pm

I missed the real problem you are having. There are a variety of techniques to boot to a bootable CD
1. With your bootable disk in the drive, hold the 'C' key while booting. When you see the grey apple, and the spinning gear, you can release, it will be booting to something (and should be the CD) and you can't change the boot after that point
2. Hold the 'Option' key at boot, (Any volume that will boot your system should show on the blue boot screen) then select your choice of bootable drives or partitions, then click on the right-facing arrow on the screen.
3. Insert your bootable CD in the drive after the system is logged in. Change the startup disk in your System preferences, and reboot.
That's your main choices. There are other ways to set the boot drive from the Open Firmware screen, or started in single-user mode, but I don't know them.
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rockstars2k - Apr 22, 2005 - 12:31 am

Delta,
Hey!! I figured it out and may even now be able to help you.

When you want to burn a insall disk the actual "install disk #1.dmg" is the image file. I had been making the mistake of mounting the image file, then trying to burn it with Roxio Toast. The way I got it to work was to just right click on the .dmg file and toast it as an image file using the copy function in Toast and it worked like a charm. I had read a couple of articles about the mac disk utility, but that damn thing is harder to use than Chinese arithmetic.....

I am now happily using my 2 40G HD and also my 160G external HD and all is well in MAC-Ville

I do have one other question for you though. When I formatted my 160G external firewire disk (just normal IDE/ATA drive in a firewire case) it only reports back as a 130G HD so I am losing 30G of space that I would really like back. It is formatted as the MAC extended journal and I let the MAC do it when it found the new disk. Any clues to why it lopped off 30G? I can't even imagine that OS X Panther couldn't recognize disks over 130G....

Any help you can give would be great. I also donated to the forum for your help with this and for future help. I am a systems engineer and do a lot of tech support for my customers in the data storage/disaster recovery industry and to be truely honest, I was extremely impressed with how fast my support request got answered and your willingness to stick with it and help me.

Thank you for your help and I hope to be able to deal with you again.

Sincerely,
Michael Planck....aka "Rockstar"

DeltaMac - Apr 22, 2005 - 7:05 am

The question about the loss of space on your big hard drive is simple. Panther supports large hard drives, but the old FireWire case where you have the big hard drive does not. Sometimes there is a firmware update from the manufacturer that will provide that support, but usually you have to replace the case. Check with the manufacturer of the the FireWire case, or OWC may have something that you can download to try an update.
Without that, the maximum size is 128GB and no more, partitioning the drive is also not an answer.
You could put the drive inside your Mac, but the logic board does not support large drives either. Only the newer G4 towers ( and most all newer Macs) support what is called LBA addressing, and you are limited to 128GB, unless you add a PCI IDE drive adapter that supports large drives.

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