Need help with a Mac PPC G4 upgrade (1 Viewer)

[John Wilson]

Hey fellow HTF'ers.

I am just getting my feet wet in the Mac world so I am a complete noob when working with these units, especially the G4 towers. Here is my scenario: I originally purchased a Digital Audio G4 with OS 10.2.6 but with no disks. It was fine for a while but I wanted something more so I got a hold of a retail DVD of Leopard 10.5.6 but never got around to installing it, mainly because the system only had a CD -R/W drive and jaguar doesn't support a DVD drive. Recently I bought a Power Mac G4 Quicksilver 2002 with Tiger 10.4.11 already installed.

 

What I would like to do is install the Leopard OS onto the Quicksilver system but I would also like to have the Tiger OS on the Digital Audio model. I have a DVD writer on the Quicksilver but Jaguar (10.2.8) doesn't support a DVD drive. Is there a straightforward way to do this? I don't have access to a Firewire drive. Can I clone the Quicksilver drive onto a new HDD and then install it in the Digital Audio system and then install the leopard OS onto the Quicksilver system? I don't know all of the finer points to do this but I have heard that its easier to move drives on similar hardware Mac systems than on a PC.

 

Is there some kind of guide I could follow to do this? I'm pretty good at following directions but I don't want to mess up either system by doing something stupid.

 

 

 

 

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

John, you need to post a flowchart to help everyone understand what you are trying to do.

 

If you didn't have data on the Digital Audio machine that you needed, you could connect it to the Quicksilver machine with a FireWire cable, boot the Digital Audio machine into Target Disk Mode (hold down the "T" key at startup) and then reformat the drive using Disk Utility. You could then use a cloning tool like Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the entire contents of your Quicksilver machine to the Digital Audio machine. After you are finished, you could then install Leopard on the Quicksilver machine. If you have data on the Digital Audio machine you can't do without or you just want to have it backed up somewhere for safety, you obviously would first have to get either an external HDD or a second internal HDD before performing any of these steps.

 

[John Wilson]

Hi Michael. Yes, a flowchart would be helpful but I think you have managed to weed through it to understand what I want to do. I have a related question: Could I clone the Tiger OS on the Quicksilver to another internal HDD and then install it on the Digital Audio system and have it boot just fine and recognize the hardware differences between the two systems? The differences between the two would be: Optical drive, memory, processor, video card. On a PC, the target PC would freak out with a boot HDD that was seeing so many hardware changes.

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

I think it should work, John. Just to be safe, I would reapply the 10.4.11 combo update to the QuickSilver machine before cloning it.

 

[John Wilson]

Forgive my ignorance but what is the "10.4.11 combo update" ? I know when I first got the Quicksilver that it updated to 10.4.11 from whatever it was. How would I force another identical update to the same machine?

 

Thanks for your help. I'm trying to catch on here but it slow going.

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

Download this combo update and install it. And in the future, skip the System updates when they pop up in the Software Update window. Instead, download the appropriate combo updater and install it.

 

Ha...these old combo updates are paltry in size compared to the Snow Leopard combo updates.

 

[Ken Chan]

 

Originally Posted by Michael_K_Sr

in the future, skip the System updates when they pop up in the Software Update window. Instead, download the appropriate combo updater and install it.

Considering that nowadays the Update window pops up after it has already downloaded the stuff in the background, this advice certainly encourages "wasting bits" and more importantly, time. Preferring the combo update seems akin to the Repair Permissions voodoo.