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Resolved Installing Tiger by USB on wiped PowerBook G4

M

MHanson75

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 7, 2019
22
5
Not sure if this is the right place for posting this, but I recently got my hands on a 17" PowerBook G4 with a wiped hard drive.

I have a .dmg of 10.4 that I'm trying to write to a USB flash drive so I can boot from it and install Tiger.
I don't have access to any system running OS X so I can't use Disk Utility to create an install USB. I've tried TransMac on Windows but I need the partition number to be able to access it through Open Firmware on the PowerBook.

I'm currently running Windows 7 x64 and I have access to Arch Linux, so if there's any workaround in Linux that would help me, I'll give it a try.
 
Look at this video. It is for 10.5 but I imagine it will work for Tiger.


 
Installation is straight forward once you have the USB install disk made. I generally don't mess around with finding the USB ID in OF, but instead just type boot ud:,//:tbxi and most of the time it will boot.

Here's an idle thought on how to make a bootable installer with the tools you have available-perhaps @LightBulbFun can comment as to whether or not it will work. I would probably first try mounting the image(not sure what hoops you would have to jump through to mount a .dmg, but it should be possible). Then, use dd to get the installer onto the USB drive.

With that said, I haven't personally experimented with it, but some folks have reported booting a USB drive with nothing but the image dumped on a properly formatted drive(HFS+, APM). I forget if this is an Intel only thing or if it will also work on PPC.

One last thing-do you have access to an optical drive? Tiger will fit on a standard single layer DVD, and in my experience will burn reliably. It was also available as a 4 CD set-when Tiger was first released to retail, it was only available on DVD for the desktop version, but supported a bunch of computers that didn't ship with DVD drives. You could go to an Apple store and exchange the DVD for the 4 CD set. Somewhere or another I have pressed/printed disks, but I also have had official Apple Tiger CDs that were burned-I'd guess that the stores burned them on demand. I keep CDs around since the higher density of DVDs can occasionally make booting off one a bit touchy on a marginal or dirty drive, while CDs boot fine in the same drive.
 
Last edited:
MHanson75 said:
Not sure if this is the right place for posting this, but I recently got my hands on a 17" PowerBook G4 with a wiped hard drive.
Click to expand...
It's the perfect place. This is the PowerPC Mac forum on MacRumors and we're all about these old Macs.

When you finally get an OS installed, drop in at Club 17 and become a member!
 
bunnspecial said:
Installation is straight forward once you have the USB install disk made. I generally don't mess around with finding the USB ID in OF, but instead just type boot ud:,//:tbxi and most of the time it will boot.

Here's an idle thought on how to make a bootable installer with the tools you have available-perhaps @LightBulbFun can comment as to whether or not it will work. I would probably first try mounting the image(not sure what hoops you would have to jump through to mount a .dmg, but it should be possible). Then, use dd to get the installer onto the USB drive.

With that said, I haven't personally experimented with it, but some folks have reported booting a USB drive with nothing but the image dumped on a properly formatted drive(HFS+, APM). I forget if this is an Intel only thing or if it will also work on PPC.

One last thing-do you have access to an optical drive? Tiger will fit on a standard single layer DVD, and in my experience will burn reliably. It was also available as a 4 CD set-when Tiger was first released to retail, it was only available on DVD for the desktop version, but supported a bunch of computers that didn't ship with DVD drives. You could go to an Apple store and exchange the DVD for the 4 CD set. Somewhere or another I have pressed/printed disks, but I also have had official Apple Tiger CDs that were burned-I'd guess that the stores burned them on demand. I keep CDs around since the higher density of DVDs can occasionally make booting off one a bit touchy on a marginal or dirty drive, while CDs boot fine in the same drive.
Click to expand...
I've tried just typing in boot ud:,//:tbxi but it keepds coming up with "Can't open device or file" so I really don't know what's the problem
 
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MHanson75 said:
I've tried just typing in boot ud:,//:tbxi but it keepds coming up with "Can't open device or file" so I really don't know what's the problem
Click to expand...


Hmmm. Here is says to use the backslash boot ud:,\\:tbxi


  1. Type "boot ud:,\\:tbxi" and if you're lucky, it will start booting from your USB device. If not, continue on.
  2. Type "dev usb0" at the little ">" prompt and hit return.
  3. Type "ls". If you see something like "/disk@1", continue, else go to the previous step and use "usb1" instead.
  4. If you get here and you haven't seen something like "/disk@1", then you're likely screwed, sorry.
  5. Type "dev disk@1" and hit return, and then "pwd" and hit return again. You should see something that looks like "/pci@f2000000/usb1b,1/disk@1". You will use this in the next step.
  6. Type "boot /pci@f2000000/usb1b,1/disk@1:,\\:tbxi". This is the device part you got in the last step after typing "pwd" with ":,\\:tbxi" added to the end.
http://ben-collins.blogspot.com/2010/08/booting-your-ibook-g4-from-usb-stick.html
 
sawpits said:
Hmmm. Here is says to use the backslash boot ud:,\\:tbxi


  1. Type "boot ud:,\\:tbxi" and if you're lucky, it will start booting from your USB device. If not, continue on.
  2. Type "dev usb0" at the little ">" prompt and hit return.
  3. Type "ls". If you see something like "/disk@1", continue, else go to the previous step and use "usb1" instead.
  4. If you get here and you haven't seen something like "/disk@1", then you're likely screwed, sorry.
  5. Type "dev disk@1" and hit return, and then "pwd" and hit return again. You should see something that looks like "/pci@f2000000/usb1b,1/disk@1". You will use this in the next step.
  6. Type "boot /pci@f2000000/usb1b,1/disk@1:,\\:tbxi". This is the device part you got in the last step after typing "pwd" with ":,\\:tbxi" added to the end.
http://ben-collins.blogspot.com/2010/08/booting-your-ibook-g4-from-usb-stick.html
Click to expand...
Now it says
"USB-MS-CLASS: open of DISK-LABEL failed can't OPEN: /pci@f2000000/usb@1b/disk@1:,\\:tbxi
can't open device or file"
At this point I'm starting to wonder if it's not my .dmg that's messed up
 
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I'm gonna attempt to install Snow Leopard on my old Acer Aspire One netbook and use Disk Utility on there to create a bootable USB.

I'll keep you guys updated on what happens!
 
MHanson75 said:
Now it says
"USB-MS-CLASS: open of DISK-LABEL failed can't OPEN: /pci@f2000000/usb@1b/disk@1:,\\:tbxi
can't open device or file"
At this point I'm starting to wonder if it's not my .dmg that's messed up
Click to expand...


Try:

This is the command which worked : boot /pci@f2000000/usb1b,1/disk@1:3,\\:tbxi

There are several other command lines which also worked for some people at the link.

Such as: boot usb1/disk@1:3,\\:tbxi

http://ben-collins.blogspot.com/2010/08/booting-your-ibook-g4-from-usb-stick.html
[doublepost=1560038645][/doublepost]Did you format the USB drive as Apple Partition Map rather than GUID?
[doublepost=1560039063][/doublepost]Also as shown in the first video I linked:

I got it to work by directing it to the specific place on the usb drive:
boot usb1/disk@1:3/System\Library\CoreServices\BootX then I hit enter and voila Mac OS X 10.5.6 (updated to 10.5.8 with the first software updateran).

The guy in the first video used that same command.
 
sawpits said:
Try:

This is the command which worked : boot /pci@f2000000/usb1b,1/disk@1:3,\\:tbxi

There are several other command lines which also worked for some people at the link.

Such as: boot usb1/disk@1:3,\\:tbxi

http://ben-collins.blogspot.com/2010/08/booting-your-ibook-g4-from-usb-stick.html
[doublepost=1560038645][/doublepost]Did you format the USB drive as Apple Partition Map rather than GUID?
[doublepost=1560039063][/doublepost]Also as shown in the first video I linked:

I got it to work by directing it to the specific place on the usb drive:
boot usb1/disk@1:3/System\Library\CoreServices\BootX then I hit enter and voila Mac OS X 10.5.6 (updated to 10.5.8 with the first software updateran).

The guy in the first video used that same command.
Click to expand...

I've tried all of these commands multiple times with different drives and different images, I even downloaded the Tiger and Leopard images from that video and still nothing.

How can I format my drive as Apple Partition Map and write the dmg on it without access to OS X?
 
MHanson75 said:
I've tried all of these commands multiple times with different drives and different images, I even downloaded the Tiger and Leopard images from that video and still nothing.

How can I format my drive as Apple Partition Map and write the dmg on it without access to OS X?
Click to expand...
Is the problem, perhaps, that you simply copied the DMG file to your USB stick and are then trying to boot from it?

If so, then that is the problem. It's like copying a zip file and then trying to use the program inside without unzipping it first.

The DMG needs to be opened and the contents properly copied to the USB stick, or a disk burned. That's what Disk Utility would do if you had access to it.

You're going to need another Mac or a VM that can run OS X so you can either copy the contents of the image correctly or burn a disk.
 
eyoungren said:
Is the problem, perhaps, that you simply copied the DMG file to your USB stick and are then trying to boot from it?

If so, then that is the problem. It's like copying a zip file and then trying to use the program inside without unzipping it first.

The DMG needs to be opened and the contents properly copied to the USB stick, or a disk burned. That's what Disk Utility would do if you had access to it.

You're going to need another Mac or a VM that can run OS X so you can either copy the contents of the image correctly or burn a disk.
Click to expand...

That's what I'm trying to do. I'm gonna attempt to make a Hackintosh, but if you happen to know a way I could run OS X in a virtual machine on Windows 7 Ultimate x64 I'd really prefer that over wasting time trying to hackintosh and have it end up not working.

I've been using TransMac to create the drives, isn't it supposed to copy over the dmg content the proper way?
 
MHanson75 said:
How do I move the files onto it after formatting it? Windows can't read HFS/HFS+ drives.
Click to expand...


I imagine that since the drive is connected to a Windows machine you can copy the OS to it at that time. He says:

Most users will never need to create an HFS+ disk outside of Mac, but businesses that rely on virtualization to run other operating systems may need to format in Windows a flash drive with an HFS+ partition. Once the partition has been created on the storage device, the Mac OS installation files can be copied to the drive.​
 
sawpits said:
I imagine that since the drive is connected to a Windows machine you can copy the OS to it at that time. He says:

Most users will never need to create an HFS+ disk outside of Mac, but businesses that rely on virtualization to run other operating systems may need to format in Windows a flash drive with an HFS+ partition. Once the partition has been created on the storage device, the Mac OS installation files can be copied to the drive.​
Click to expand...
Once I use diskpart to format the drive and then try opening it from File Explorer I get the "Device needs formatting" message which prevents me from accessing it to copy the files inside.

At this point I'm thinking the only way to get this done is to use Disk Utility. I just need to find a way to run OS X on Windows.
 
MHanson75 said:
I don't have access to any system running OS X so I can't use Disk Utility to create an install USB. I've tried TransMac on Windows but I need the partition number to be able to access it through Open Firmware on the PowerBook.
Click to expand...


This is the odd part. Why would you not know the partition number? And you can make several guesses once in Open Firmware.
 
Dronecatcher said:
What about using a Linux Live disk to boot your PC and using any of the LInux tools to format the USB and write the DMG to it?
Click to expand...
There's a Linux tool that would format USB drives to HFS+ and write .dmg on it?
bunnspecial said:
Is there any reason why you can't just burn a disk?
Click to expand...
I don't own any disk and I'm not even sure what kind I need to burn Tiger on or if I have the right tools to do it. I don't want to buy a disk just to end up with no way to burn on it or successfully burn an image on it and have the dmg turn out to be corrupted.
Hughmac said:
Try converting the .dmg to an .iso file - a quick search showed various utilities to achieve this, for example http://www.anyburn.com/tutorials/convert-dmg-to-iso.htm

Cheers :)

Hugh
Click to expand...
I've already attempted that and the result is the same :/
sawpits said:
This is the odd part. Why would you not know the partition number? And you can make several guesses once in Open Firmware.
Click to expand...

I've tried partition numbers from 0 to 9 and none worked.

I'm going to attempt to write the dmg to the PowerBook's hard drive and then boot from it, create a USB drive and then install from it.

I'll keep you guys updated on how things turn out.

Thank you all so much for all the help you've been giving me I really appreciate the support.
 
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MHanson75 said:
I don't own any disk and I'm not even sure what kind I need to burn Tiger on or if I have the right tools to do it. I don't want to buy a disk just to end up with no way to burn on it or successfully burn an image on it and have the dmg turn out to be corrupted.
Click to expand...

You need a DVD(go with DVD-R to be safe, although anything should work).

Burning it from Linux should work. Even burning from DVD would PROBABLY be okay.

Even though I've installed Tiger from a USB, honestly it's much less of a headache from a disk in my experience unless there's some overwhelming reason why you can't use one.
 
bunnspecial said:
You need a DVD(go with DVD-R to be safe, although anything should work).

Burning it from Linux should work. Even burning from DVD would PROBABLY be okay.

Even though I've installed Tiger from a USB, honestly it's much less of a headache from a disk in my experience unless there's some overwhelming reason why you can't use one.
Click to expand...
I just got myself 2 DVD-R's. How do I get the Tiger dmg on there?
 
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