So I've been running Tiger on my AlBook for a while now, and I figure it's probably time I throw it on the Blue & White G3 I'm planning to set up as a server.
I've run into a bit of a problem, though. The copies of Tiger I have access to are only on DVD (we have a site license for it at work, and that license extends to employees' personal use), but my B&W only has a CD-RW drive. I figured that I'd be able to throw the machine into Target Disk mode and install Tiger through FireWire from my AlBook, but lo and behold, my B&W doesn't support TDM. It also appears to lack the standard boot manager (hold the Option key down at startup), as I'm unable to boot from the AlBook's hard drive when the AlBook is in TDM.
I'm not going to pull my DVD burner out of my desktop PC just to install Tiger on this thing...there has to be another way. AFAIK, the B&W is running the latest firmware version (1.1, IIRC), so I'm out of ideas. Anyone got any?
unfortunately, since tdm isn't supported, nor is booting from firewire for the blue and white. The Blue and White G3, and PCI graphics G4 as well (share the same logic board) have the firewire on a box that connects to the logic board. While the firewire is built in, it isn't built into the board, which is required for booting from it or target disk mode. If you have a firewire drive cabinet, I'd recommend pulling the drive from your blue and white, putting it in the cabinet, then installing to it from the powerbook. I know it's not the most elegant solution, but it's the best I can think of.
However, it should be noted that the blue and white isn't what I'd consider to be the best platform for tiger. I have a 350mhz B&W w/ 1gb ram, 80gb 7200 rpm drive, and 4x superdrive. It runs substantially slower (as expected) than my AIBook (1.5/1gb/80gb 5400rpm). For what I use it for, backup server, the blue and white is great. If you have any way to do the install via network, netboot will work fine on it. Trouble is that netboot requires a server with mac os x server installed. As for breaking the dvd image into two cd's, I'm not sure yet. I know that some of the old Mac OS (7.6) had the floppy images on the cd. Perhaps those cd images are the dvd?
-iantm
1: Install a second hard drive in your B&W, or partition the existing drive into two pieces and reinstall another version of OS X.
2: Connect your Laptop to the B&W in Target Disk Mode.
3: Use Carbon Copy Cloner, Disk Utility, ditto, or whatever to copy the working "Tiger" install from your laptop to the blank drive/partition.
http://www.bombich.com/mactips/image.html
Theoretically you could avoid the "second hard disk/partition" hangup by crafting a suitable bootable OS X/Darwin CD which contains the cloning tools.
Borrowing the DVD drive from your other computer is probably the least painful way in the end, however. By a long shot.
--Peace
Why not just source a bare DVD-ROM mechanism, they're certainly cheap enough nowadays. Even a DVD-R/RW can be had for $50 or so. Having a DVD drive would sure simplify the whole thing, eh?
dan k
Not really no - those machines need a decoder card to run DVD drives. You do see them on eBay from time to time but I have a feeling they only work with some drives.
If you don't mind stuffing about you could always put the drive into an external FW case, partition it, copy the Tiger installer disk onto the partition you intend to use for storage, boot from there and run the installer.
Actually one of the technicians here is going to install Tiger on a B&W next week so I can let you know how he did it if you want.
Cheers, k.
The decoder card is for decoding MPEG2 video, and decoding video *only*. A B&W works fine with a DVD drive from a data standpoint. (Further, I've personally booted my B&W with a terribly generic DVD+/-R burner off a Powerbook recovery DVD. Undoubtedly your mileage may vary, as Macs are terribly picky about firmware compatability, but..)
--Peace
It sounds like my only options really are to either 1) buy a DVD drive for it (not gonna happen because I've already sunk money into a CD-RW drive) or 2) ripping apart my external FireWire enclosure yet again (it's starting to get worn out from swapping in drives) so I can install Tiger from the AlBook. My work has already said that since they've paid for a site license for Tiger, they're not going to shell out additional money for the CD-ROM version (which you have to special-order from Apple), and also becuase our software asset manager is a Mac head and thinks that if a Mac doesn't come with a DVD drive already, then it shouldn't be running Tiger in the first place.
I've long been pining for a Mac mini, so I think I might just end up selling the frickin' B&W to help pay for one. The fact that the B&Ws don't support TDM (which is interesting, because just a few years ago I could have sworn that we were getting B&Ws at work to boot into TDM so we could pull disk images of their hard drives before they went back to the leasing company) doesn't help me much, because I was planning on doing periodic backups to my external FireWire drive using Carbon Copy Cloner.
This may be a bad idea, but why not remove the HD and bring it to work and do the install there with a DVD drive Mac? Are the files installed specialized for each machine? Would it cause problems? I have done this many times with my G4 733 and it "seems" fine... I have the same problem as "my" 733 has no DVD drive. The worst case scenerio seems that you might get software you don't need, - DVD player...
Cheers.
That's interesting - I got a B&W for free a few months ago that wouldn't boot from the generic DVD-ROM drive that had been installed in it. Pulled it out, put in a CD-ROM drive, up she comes, no problems. Runs fine. I'd read something about the decoder cards someplace and assumed it was in need of one... hmmm, mebbe that particular drive's a dud... wonder where I put it?
Cheers, k.
http://www.geeklan.co.uk/?p=26
http://www.geeklan.co.uk/?p=27
Hey Dr. Webster,
I'm pretty sure that you can get firewire target disk mode by holding down "T" during startup.
That works on an old Beige G3 that I have which only has Firewire from an installed, extra Firewire card.
If you still cannot get the TDM to work, but have an external drive, you may still be able to get around not having a DVD drive:
1. Make sure the external drive is blessed with a working system. **
2. Using another computer copy the DVD onto the external drive
3. Using "Startup Disk" in System Preferences, reboot the G3 from the external drive
4. Find the "OSInstall.mpkg" from the DVD. It is in "Mac OS X Install DVD">System>Installation>Packages. ***
5. Follow the instructions to install the system on your drive.
** If you only have an exernal drive that cannot boot your computer, simply use the installer on it while it is connected to another computer.
*** Use this instead of the "Install Mac OS X" at the top level of the DVD, because I think that would want you to restart from the DVD...
hope that helps,
Randall
Thanks for all the suggestions.
What I ended up doing was installing Tiger from DVD onto an external hard drive using a machine at work, and pulling an ASR image from that. I then booted off of a custom Panther boot CD and restored the image to the B&W's hard drive.
Of course, a week after I did all that, we found out that one of our Tiger DVDs was defective, and just traded it in for the CD version.
When I bought Tiger for My G3 I just bought a Apple Branded DVD RW drive with it.... After I installed the drive Tiger installed without a hitch...
Quote from bath_toaster:
Not really no - those machines need a decoder card to run DVD drives. You do see them on eBay from time to time but I have a feeling they only work with some drives.
The decoder card is for decoding MPEG2 video, and decoding video *only*. A B&W works fine with a DVD drive from a data standpoint. (Further, I've personally booted my B&W with a terribly generic DVD+/-R burner off a Powerbook recovery DVD. Undoubtedly your mileage may vary, as Macs are terribly picky about firmware compatability, but..)
--Peace
B&W G3's will play DVD movies without the decoder in OS X. The decoder card is only needed to decode DVD movies in OS 8.5 - 9.2.
OS X has a built-in software decoding and most DVD-ROM's will work. I have used several Hitachi's and Pioneers without problems. Burners are a different story though.
I made a Panther Install CD from a Panther Install DVD using hdiutil on a G4 ibook but it's not really easy to do.
Login as root on the Mac with the DVD.
Make a read write image of the DVD Install Disc then eject the DVD and mount the image and then just keep the base install packages on the image so the image will burn onto a CD.
I had BaseSystem.pkg BSD.pkg Essentials.pkg Java.pkg MediaFiles.pkg plus some mpkg files
that might not all be essential AdditionalPrinterDrivers.mpkg BundledSoftware.mpkg EssentialSystemSoftware.mpkg Fonts.mpkg Languages.mpkg OSInstall.mpkg.
The packages are in a hidden folder /Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc1/System/Installation/Packages/,packages.
Use Go to Folder from the Go menu to get to the .packages folder.
Then from the Terminal use hdiutil create -srcdir /Volumes/"Mac OS X Install Disc 1" -noscrub -noanyowners -stretch 650m -format UDRW ~/Desktop/CD.img
and CD.img will appear on the Desktop.
It might take a few tries to get the size right so the image will fit on a CD.
Then burn CD.img to a CD.
I'd suggest doing it on a RW CD otherwise a lot of coasters might be burnt.
Very cool solution, ccowner!
For folks who might be interested, an IDE-to-USB adapter can be handy in these situations. One can remove the G3's internal HD, and then instead of having to install it inside a Tiger-compatible Mac just for installation purposes, one can use the IDE-to-USB adapter to hook up the bare drive externally.
Of course it's only worth it if the adapter is inexpensive. And today DealMac has a link to one for only $18 shipped.
http://dealmac.com/deals/Bytecc-IDE-to-USB-2-0-Drive-Adapter-for-17-1-shipping/92755.html
Matt
I've been thinking of upgrading my brother's B&W to tiger from 10.1 but don't really want to if its too slow. Whats it like on the B&W is it slow, fast, middling, plus are effects such as fast user switching or dasboard ripples present on the default ati graphics card??
joel
Don't know how it got there...(bought it that way)...But, in response to "moros" I say this: Tiger runs fine on my B&W with a 6gb harddrive with 192 mb of ram. It boots fairly speedy, and I can run Safari and AIM simultaneously...with no problems. A lot of virtual memory is in use, though, and so I am left with about 500 mb of storage space on the hard drive. Things like Microsoft Word startup extremely slow, but work fine once they're up. But seriously...I need more memory.
I have Tiger running on my B&W all i did was put in an apple branded superdrive and install. But my B&W has a 500 Mhz G4 in it and a Radeon 7000 PCI. So if you have a DVD drive that you can boot off of it should run.
And the decoder is only used to play DVD movies not to access the drive.
I should know I have my 486 using a spare ide dvd drive and it can read dvd but not play movies.
i will also note that my B&W plays movies fine with panther and a bare "liteon" dvd drive
well, I am currently running Ubuntu on my Rev 1 B&W G3 (the one iantm sold me, and probibly the one he is talking about up there), so you may want to give up running tiger on it (for now), and put Ubuntu on it. it makes a fine server platform, and stable as a rock. If you cant download the iso (free) and burn to a CD, order a retail Cd (also free). just make sure you get the PowerPC version in either scenario.
I should be getting panther from iantm in a few days, since the Jaguar CD set he shipped with the machine was bad. Im sure panther will run very nicely on it.
so, even though (according to apple-history.com), the B&W G3 supports up to 10.4.3 (so far. who knows if this thing will be supported by leopard when it comes out), you may want to bump donw a level and run panther.
btw, I freakin love this machine. I really like it's easy over-clockabillity (was running at 350mhz, now it's at 400 with narrry a hiccup), it's support for up to a gig of ram (mine only has 640, but it is only showing half of the 256mb stick in there), the built in firewire, and the ADB port, so you can use an old AppleDesign Keyboard and Apple Desktop Bus Mous II, leaving the USB ports free.
-digital