I'm trying to format and reinstall OS X Leopard on my old PowerBook G4, so I can get it all ready to donate to charity. The computer currently has Leopard installed, but is incredibly messed up and needs to be reinstalled.

My Superdrive doesn't want to seem to read the Leopard install disc. Upon boot-up it stalls as it tries to boot to the disc. The DVD reads just fine on my new MacBookPro. The PowerBook plays DVD movies just fine, so I don't know what the deal is.

I thought about putting an ISO on a USB hard drive, but remembered you can't boot to a USB drive on the PowerPC Macs. I don't have a firewire drive. I know the MacBookAirs can boot to a network share but I'm pretty sure that isn't included in my old PB's firmware. Still searching on that.

Do yall know of a good way that I might can make this happen?

10/10/2009 10:02:15 PM

http://frank.gwc.org.uk/~ali//nb/
it's for OS9, but the instructions should still work.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-Your-Regular-Mac-a-NetBoot-Server!/


basically, you can netboot the install image. i haven't done it on a G4 in a while, but IIRC, you should be able to do it. i know for a fact the AGP ones can.

10/10/2009 10:08:38 PM

evan your links always give me headaches

i think by the time i even got to the point where i understood what ^ those sites were talking about best buy will have opened tomorrow, i could have bought a firewire hard drive and installed it from that

or i could put Tiger on it and be done with it haha

10/10/2009 10:21:14 PM