Installing Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on Unsupported Hardware
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We believe in the long term value of Apple hardware. You should be able to use your Apple gear as long as it helps you remain productive and meets your needs, upgrading only as necessary. We want to help maximize the life of your Apple gear.
This week we're going to break the rules and be rebels. We're
going to install Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on a Lombard PowerBook G3. These
instructions should work with most Macs with a G3 or later CPU or a
G3 or later upgrade.
Apple officially saays it is not going to support any Mac that
doesn't have built-in FireWire ports and at least 256 MB of RAM. My
Lombard does not have FireWire and only has 192 MB of RAM, but it's
pretty much the same hardware as the supported Pismo model.
Remember to backup all your data before installing anything.
What you need:
A Mac that has at lease a G3 processor
More than 128 MB of RAM for usable speeds - 96 MB is possible
but very slow
6 GB hard drive or larger, split into two partitions
Mac OS X 10.4 install DVD or CDs or on a external hard
drive
The first step is to have your hard drive partitioned into at
least two partitions. One is going to be the Mac OS 9 partition,
which only needs to be at around 1 GB or so depending whether
your going to install much "classic" software or not. The second
partition is for Mac OS X and needs to be at least 2 GB.
I used a 40 GB drive in my Lombard and selected 10 GB for OS 9
and 30 GB for OS X. [Editor's note: My 40 GB drive is
partitioned with 19 GB for OS X, 3 GB for OS 9, and
8 GB for work.]
Boot up Mac OS 9.x, install XPostFacto to you hard drive, and
launch it. Remember to read the ReadMe file for the warnings and
precaution before continuing.
Select the target disk partition you are installing it to.
Select the Install media that you are using, DVD or CD
Click on the install button, and then watch the machine do very
strange things. It's important not to interrupt the install
process.. At times it looks like your Mac will freeze up, but trust
me - just leave it be.
It's normal to see a bunch of text, which is called verbose
mode. The Mac OS X installation screen will come up asking you
what language you want to install when its finally ready to install
OS X.
After that, follow normal installing procedures for OS X, and
you're done.
Mac of the Day: PowerBook 500 Series, introduced 1994.05.16. 'Blackbird' includes a 25 to 33 MHz 68040 along with smart batteries and grayscale or color displays.
We believe in the long term value of Apple hardware. You should be able to use your Apple gear as long as it helps you remain productive and meets your needs, upgrading only as necessary. We want to help maximize the life of your Apple gear.
We believe in the long term value of Apple hardware. You should be able to use your Apple gear as long as it helps you remain productive and meets your needs, upgrading only as necessary. We want to help maximize the life of your Apple gear.
