In my last article I went into somewhat excessive detail on my recently purchased PowerBook G4. The machine was quite “used and abused” and was running an install of MacOS X 10.4 Tiger which was somewhat broken. Also broken on the machine was the Superdrive, which eliminated my ability to actually reinstall Tiger, or upgrade to Leopard, from disc.
I mentioned at the end of the previous article that I tried to use an iPod, connected via Firewire. to accomplish the reinstall. This probably needs a bit of explanation.
All but the last generation of PowerPC Macintosh systems do not boot from USB devices. While my Power Mac G5 and all my Intel based Macs can, the PowerBook G4 is one of the former category. It will, however, boot from an external device connected via Firewire. That’s great, save for the fact that Firewire is basically a dead interface format, one that barely made a splash in the Windows PC scene. It was, however, ubiquitous in the Macintosh scene for easily a decade plus, which is great for things I may want to buy in the future, but doesn’t do me any good now.
So, I figured a Firewire device would be a good way to install the OS. My original plan was to just order some cables and use Target Disc Mode, a way to turn a Macintosh into basically an oversized external drive, to install the OS. That, of course, required those cables to come in, but I had an idea – why not use an old iPod for this task? They used Firewire as their connector type and incidentally at work we have a Firewire iPod cable! It could work!
So, late night, the very same night I wrote the previous article I made an attempt. I copied the disc image data for the Leopard install DVD to the iPod and told the machine to reboot from it.
The end result was a whole heap of nothing. The machine won’t boot from an iPod!
The reason actually makes sense when you think about how an iPod used as an external storage device works — it doesn’t switch to being a mountable file system until the operating system – in this case MacOS – tells it to! That means the filsystem isn’t available on boot, and thus the system can’t boot from the iPod as a drive.
You have to admit, it wasn’t a terrible idea to try, and it would have been pretty cool to “Druaga1” the install, if you will. Maybe there is a way to force it with some custom software, but I’m honestly too damn lazy go to through that effort – I’d rather wait for the Firewire cables to get here. Luckily, I didn’t need to wait.
Before I left work that night I found a spare hard drive adapter that happened to have a laptop IDE connector on it which meant so long as I could remove the hard drive from the PowerBook I could access it via USB and do whatever I wished.
I did just that. The moment I got home I grabbed my tools and opened the PowerBook enough to get the hard drive out. I connected it to the adapter and plugged it into my Mac Pro. For longer than I feel it should have taken, there was nothing – no activity on the machine. Then, the drive mounted. I was in.
The first thing I did was make an image of the drive as it was — I had used the machine a bit, and changed a few things, but for the most part it was as I had gotten it, and I wanted to archive and preserve the state of the machine for, well, whatever reason.
Once that was done I formatted the drive. This left me in a clean state, but I wasn’t done yet. Taking a note from Windows OEM installs, and modern MacOS restore partitions, I formatted 10 gigs of the 80 gig drive and copied the Leopard install DVD to it. A temporary, but critical step, as this meant I could actually install the damned operating system to the machine!
Once the copy was done, I held my breath and rebooted, holding down the option key to bring up the boot drive selection menu. What I got was an absolutely glorious boot menu showing the install partition ready and waiting to be booted from. I selected it and was greeted with the oh so lovely Leopard Aurora wallpaper.
The install was absolutely normal, and after about 30 minutes everything was done — I was in a fresh, fully functional Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard install. The swan song of the PowerPC Macintosh era, but one hell of a release to go out on.
With that, I’ve been using the machine near constantly over the weekend and the first part of this week. Even as I type this I’ve got videos playing on it from my local server, and things are holding up fine. I’ve tossed some staple PowerPC games on it, like Marathon, and have been rather impressed by what this machine can do. Of course it’s a 2004 PowerPC based Macintosh laptop, but it’s still a capable machine for what it is.
It’s been beaten to hell, it has a dead optical drive and fan, but this machine is showing promise. The Superdrive and fan are replaceable, and I can swap out the hard drive for a cheap IDE SSD without much issue or cost, so it’s entirely possible for me to mostly restore this machine within reason. At this stage, having fixed the hinge and gotten a fresh MacOS install on it I’ve already increased its value to beyond what I paid for it (I got a pretty good deal I’d say, barring the time I invested in repairing it) and while the above improvements wouldn’t increase the value too much, I’m still considering keeping the machine for the foreseeable and I’d naturally want it running as well as it can.
More to come on this machine in the future but for now we need to go back — we’ve jumped ahead about 7 months on this crazy story of me finally getting bitten by the Apple bug, as they say.