Installing OS X on a G4 “quicksilver” without DVD

What a pain, yesterday at noon I started installing the new goodies here at work for the art dept. We got Tiger, new 20 inch wide screen cinema displays and photoshop CS2. Ok. so thats fine.. whats the pain part? Well the copy of Tiger I got came in DVD format. Me not being the uber mac guy didn’t realize the Quicksilver mac didnt come with a DVD drive. So the “Family Pack” DVD i bought of Tiger wont install on the old machine without some muscle.

i did some searches on google and found a few people that have used an Ipod to copy over the ISO of the CD to it, then install tiger off of the ipod. I didnt have an Ipod so we didnt go that route. Then we found that you can install it using a method called “Target Disk Mode” for some reason it kept failing. I tried 3 different firewire wires and got the same results. Then we tried sharing the DVD drive off the other mac (a newer G5) and that didnt work either. Finally I went back to the Ipod idea. I dont have an Ipod but I did have a few smaller Firewire drives. I loaded up “Disk Utility” and gave that a shot. Disk Utility is the app that allows you do repair, delete and raid disks, and it has a way where you can Image a DVD to a ISO, then use that ISO to write the contents to another disk. Normally this wouldnt be a problem for a PC but for a mac its a big different. See you run an install app then the mac reboots and begins the install. You can just mount an ISO and expect it to auto mount after the reboot. Because of this limitation I’m thinking the only thing I can do is this harddrive/ipod idea. If not I’ll need to aquire a copy of the OS on CD, or hit up my Mac guy for a CD copy we can borrow.

The new Cinema displays are killer. We didnt get the massive 30 inch ones, but these 20 inch widescreen deallys are pretty awesome. We had 2 of them in here side by side while we were working on that firewire Target Disk Mode and I snapped a few pictures: