How do I reinstall without Firewire or an optical drive?

[Peaceful]

I've got a lime-green fruity iMac that I rescued when someone was about to take it out to the dumpster.

The optical drive is broken. The machine is a slot-loading 333MHz G3 with NO FIREWIRE. The 9GB hard-drive is partitioned into ~4GB and ~5GB partitions.

I'd reeeallyy like to get OS X on one partition on it. Is there a way that I can combine partitions or reinstall WITHOUT firwire or an optical drive? I have a powerbook, a 512MB iPod shuffle, and a PowerMac G5 at my disposal.

Thanks for any response!

 

[BlueRevolution]

in fact there is something that comes to mind. it'll feel like those puzzle games where you have to rearrange all the pieces though. use Toast on your Power Mac or PowerBook to make an image of the install DVD, or just download it - I believe if you own a legal copy there should be no problem with downloading. you have to use Toast though, Disk Utility won't give you a bootable copy.

use Stuffit to make Shuffle-sized segments of the file. put them on the iPod and ferry them over to the iMac one by one. uhhh... you'll have to combine the segments, I guess using Stuffit for OS 9. (that's what's installed now right?) restore the Toast image to the 5 gb partition, then boot from it. you should have enough space to do a bare-bones install onto the other partition, format the first partition and do what you will with it.

without another bootable drive though there'll be no way to change the partition sizes you've got though.

unless... uh, I forgot about networking. well boot from network might work then I guess, but I've never done it so I can't help you there.

 

[Peaceful]

in fact there is something that comes to mind. it'll feel like those puzzle games where you have to rearrange all the pieces though. use Toast on your Power Mac or PowerBook to make an image of the install DVD, or just download it - I believe if you own a legal copy there should be no problem with downloading. you have to use Toast though, Disk Utility won't give you a bootable copy.

use Stuffit to make Shuffle-sized segments of the file. put them on the iPod and ferry them over to the iMac one by one. uhhh... you'll have to combine the segments, I guess using Stuffit for OS 9. (that's what's installed now right?) restore the Toast image to the 5 gb partition, then boot from it. you should have enough space to do a bare-bones install onto the other partition, format the first partition and do what you will with it.

without another bootable drive though there'll be no way to change the partition sizes you've got though.

unless... uh, I forgot about networking. well boot from network might work then I guess, but I've never done it so I can't help you there.

All 3 computers are on the network. The whole point is to get the machine using one partition, so I don't think the suggestion about restoring a toast image to one of the partitions will do any good. A network install would be perfect, but I don't have OS X Server, which is what (I think) you need to do network installs.

If someone knows how I can do a network install on the G3 iMac from my G5 tower, tell me!

 

[Kyle Nerder]

I've got a lime-green fruity iMac that I rescued when someone was about to take it out to the dumpster.

The optical drive is broken. The machine is a slot-loading 333MHz G3 with NO FIREWIRE. The 9GB hard-drive is partitioned into ~4GB and ~5GB partitions.

I'd reeeallyy like to get OS X on one partition on it. Is there a way that I can combine partitions or reinstall WITHOUT firwire or an optical drive? I have a powerbook, a 512MB iPod shuffle, and a PowerMac G5 at my disposal.

Thanks for any response!

What is your other machine?
Just yank out the HD and shove it in the other machine and install from the newer/better machine.

Becareful to follow the proper precautions of unplugging and plugging in HD's.

Good luck.

(EDIT)
I just saw your other machine in your original post. I always jump ahead without reading the rest. You will not be able to plug that HD into your powermac. (ATA and SATA). Buy yourself a external Firewire HD case and put the drive in there and install the OS

 

[Mord]

you can put the imac HD where the optical drive is on the G5, the optical drive is ATA.

 

[Peaceful]

What now?

Ok, so I borrowed a G4-450 from work, added the iMac hard drive, created a disk image of the iMac hard drive using disk utility saving the image on the G4's hard drive.

Then I repartitioned the G3 iMac's hard drive into 7.4GB and 2.2GB partitions (I read that you had to have the first partition < 7.5GB on old iMacs), then restored the disk image to the 7.4GB partition.

I put the iMac hard drive back into the G3-333MHz iMac, but now all I get is a little folder with a blinking question-mark! It won't boot. Help! What do I do???

 

[Peaceful]

Ok, I found this excellent guide:

http://www.bombich.com/mactips/openfirmware.html

The steps in "The Fix" section did it for me. Yay!

 

[Mord]

Ok, so I borrowed a G4-450 from work, added the iMac hard drive, created a disk image of the iMac hard drive using disk utility saving the image on the G4's hard drive.

Then I repartitioned the G3 iMac's hard drive into 7.4GB and 2.2GB partitions (I read that you had to have the first partition < 7.5GB on old iMacs), then restored the disk image to the 7.4GB partition.

I put the iMac hard drive back into the G3-333MHz iMac, but now all I get is a little folder with a blinking question-mark! It won't boot. Help! What do I do???

install an OS or bless the drive.

(the imac will probably need a copy of OS 9 to install the firmware, so do that on one partition and 10 on the other.)