MacOS – Installing OSX onto PPC using Intel Mac and Firewire

firewiremacmacospowerpc

I have an old G5 PPC machine with no OS X installed. I have the installation disk. Unfortunateley there seems to be an issue with the G5 reading or accepting the data from the disk. I've tried Everything I can but the disk is not read. I've swapped drives etc. to no avail.

I know the G5 will not boot from USB, trust me, I've tried, then I tried again.

My current option is using Target Disk Mode and a Firewire cable (these G5's can boot from Firewire).

I have an Intel MacBook, an A1181 series.

I can boot into Target Disk Mode, the disks from the G5 are recognised. I cannot use the drive of the MacBook to install onto the hard drive of the G5 because of an error that appears along the lines of "10.3 cannot be installed on this machine", I assume it's because of the Intel/PPC difference.

So I then restored the disk to a partition of the HDD from the G5 thinking I could 'boot' from that partition and then install.

That also failed, the disk was recognised but when selected a "no entry"-like symbol displayed in the middle of screen and nothing happened until the fans went into tornado mode.

I have a PPC G5, an A1181 MacBook, Firewire cable and the OS X install disk.

EDIT: The MacBook is running Leopard.
I just tried this: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4177625?start=0&tstart=0
And the same thing happened as before: I can see the disk but when selected the Apple logo turns into a "no entry" type sign

Best Answer

There has to be a typo in the OPs question that can only be corrected by the OP: The error message "10.3 cannot be installed on this machine" is out of place there.

To install OS X (maxing out at OS X Leopard 10.5.8) you have several options regarding the DVD:

  • clean the DVD drive in the G5, the lens might just be dirty
  • clean the Installation DVD, the DVD might just be dirty, slightly scratched
  • get another Leopard Installation DVD that doesn't have these flaws

Using the Firewire and Target Disk Mode route should be possible too.

But then there is the problem with "PPC to Intel transition": PPC machines boot from drives with an Apple Partition Map and Intel machines from an GUID partition map drive.

That prevents booting the G5 form a MacBook in Target Disk Mode or if you just swap the drives out; although the contents of 10.5 installations would be the same on both machines. Using a GUID formatted drive in a PPC machine is the most likely reason for the "No-Entry"-sign: there is just no disk available the PPC machine deems bootable.

You can therefore

  • boot into Leopard on the MacBook,
  • mount the G5 in Target Disk Mode,
  • format the G5 drive with an Apple Partition Map
  • then install Leopard onto the G5 from the Macbook (this can be forced using Pacifist)

This describes the clean way.

Alternatively you could just clone the Leopard installation from the MacBook to the G5's drive.

Related Question