LincolnBlogs

I finally found my OS X 10.4 media, so today I decided that I was going to upgrade my new/old iBook. I have a usb dvd drive that I have done OS X installs form before, so I hook it up and give it a shot. No matter what I tried, I could not install from my external drive. It would regognise it while the OS was running just fine, but just would not boot from it. After doing a bit of searching I saw people talking about doing a fireware install. Basically, this is using your mac as an external fireware drive and installing to that. Well, I have never tried to do that before, so I decided to give it a try.

The first thing I had to do was find a fireware cable. Now I could swear that I had one somewhere, but after a lengthy search, I could not find it. So, I headed off to the local Staples. I bought the only cable I could find there – $31!!! $31 for a CABLE! And only 6 feet long at that. I checked all over and nowhere on this thing does it say it’s made of 24 ct gold or platinum. I also take note that the ends are not encrusted with any precious jewels either.

Anyhow, the actual install via firewire is actually quite easy. I put my iBook into storage mode by holding down the ‘t’ key after start chime. I then connected it via firewire cable to another mac I had (with a dvd drive in it). I was then able to install OSX on the other machine, but point it to the firewire drive (which is actually my iBook). It was pretty nifty actually. As soon as the install was complete and the installer asked for a reboot, I just unplugged the laptop and rebooted and was prompted with a new install of 10.4. It was really easy, just unfortunate that I had to dig out another mac to get this done.