Reinstalling/upgrading without a DVD-/+DL drive?

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tardtasticx

3075 posts

Uber Geek

#91296 11-Oct-2011 00:27

I was lucky enough to snag a free emac from some nice lady on Trademe, and it works absolutely perfect, but, she left all her stuff on there. I promised I wouldn't leave it on there and I'm usually a man of my word so I wanna get rid of it.

Its currently on OS X 10.4.11, I have the .dmg of 10.5 (leopard) on my external HDD, but its nearly 8GB so requires a DL DVD, which I have, but I dont think that emac has a DL dvd drive. Its 1GHZ G4 CPU with 3/4GB ram and 320GB HDD internal. Pretty good for a free computer. I know it will run leopard fine but I just dont have a way of doing it.

I mounted the DMG on my windows 7 based laptop using a million programs and I managed to make a copy of it in .iso format also just incase but that didnt give much help. In the windows tools of the disk (the only officially windows accessible files on the disk) I was able to run a network installer program for installing it to macs over my wired/wireless network which I thought would work. Apparently not. I followed all instructions but the application says hold control or whatever on your Macbook Air so it might not be made for use with a G4 eMac. What other ways could I go about this? I dont have a firewire HDD or DVD drive, nor do I have a firewire cable and mac to go that route either. I've mounted the .dmg on the mac itself and ran the installer but it needs to reboot then it does nothing since its on the actual mac partition.

What I'm pretty sure will work, since I've done it to upgrade to Lion from Snow Leopard on a VM, is run some terminal commands to copy all the installer files and stuff to another partition/hard drive and make it bootable, then boot from said new hard drive/partition and install to the main one from that. Problem is, 10.4 doesnt allow me to make partitions without formatting the computer and if I do that I cant boot into os X to install the DMG to the partition and stuff. I have old hard drives in a spare computer that I MIGHT try connecting to the mac but I'm not sure if that will work very well since I doubt this machine has space for 2 full desktop hard drives in it.

Also I'm pretty sure non-intel macs can't boot from USB either so thats not an option.

Need your help guys! :D I know this will be an interesting one for you lot.

- Sam.

tardtasticx

3075 posts

Uber Geek

#531749 11-Oct-2011 01:04

Also, one guy said online on a forum somewhere I cant remember the source, but he said that the DVD/CD drive can be replaced by a HDD drive since they run on different controllers. The DVD/CD drive is easier to replace than the HDD drive since I don't have to remove the Logic board to do so. Anyone had any experience with this?

tardtasticx

3075 posts

Uber Geek

#531920 11-Oct-2011 12:49

So its doing it now :D
Turned the mac over. Pulled the User Access plate off and the DVD drives cables were sitting there. Unplugged them both, and plugged my own long cable from the logic board to the HDD drive, then power was the issue left, since I couldnt plug my own one from the mac to the new drive. So I had to get out my old pc, leave the case open and hook it up to that computers power supply and leave both machines running so it could work.

Booted up, had some problems, rebooted holding the option key and selected os x, and it booted perfectly with both drives showing up in finder.

Opened disk utility, formatted new drive, made a new partition, and set it.

Plugged in my external USB drive, mounted the .dmg of leopard and restored it to the new hdd and its still currently doing that. Will update when its complete.

- Sam.

tardtasticx

3075 posts

Uber Geek

#843737 25-Jun-2013 00:37

UPDATE:
Was looking for this exact post, because I just purchased an iMac G4 off trademe and picking it up tomorrow. I'm going to use this exact same method to upgrade the OS haha.

This process worked flawlessly, and its still working today. I picked up another eMac the other day as well for $5 so will be doing the same thing, except this eMac I just got, came with ALL the original packaging, even the monster box. Its insane how huge it is but I love it. So excited to play around with this new iMac :D feel like a child again.

Hope this thread helped anyone who was looking for an alternative to updating the OS without a CD or USB, be it THE most round about way possible haha.