New to Mac with an Old iMac

[Evan90]

Hey there, I found an old iMac G3 in the garbage and nothing is wrong with it other than the disc drive. It is a slot-loading drive, but it does not accept discs anymore. I really want to upgrade to Os 10.2 (step-dad's copy) from Os 9.2, but I can't figure out how I'm going to do this without the disc drive.

Can I make a rip of the install discs and put them onto a flash drive to install? Or would I have to buy a USB CD Drive? In that case, what am I going to do to finish the install? My keyboard and mouse are USB and there are only 2 USB ports. Please help

 

[spinnerlys]

As that iMac should have Firewire, you could use a Mac OS X installation copy cloned to an HDD in that Firewire enclosure or you use a ODD connected to that Mac via Firewire, as PPC Macs are not capable to boot from USB, even if, the USB port on those Mac is USB 1.x, thus the speed would be not faster that 1.2 MB/s.

 

[Evan90]

I know these old macs have a limit on disc size, so I'm a bit confused on this. I have an old 160gb IDE drive, could I fit that into an enclosure and boot from it? I'm guessing I'd have to do a small partition because of the size limit.

Also, would I be able to install the disc as the internal at a later date?

 

[spinnerlys]

The limit seems to be 128GB for an internal HDD, but vi Firewire there is no limit.

Maybe this can help: Replacing Imac G3 Hard Drive - Size Limit?

 

[Evan90]

Thanks for all your help

So a few more questions. Once I have the enclosure, how do I mount the disc image there (in Windows 7)? What do I need to do to the iMac before the install (I'm not backing anything up as it was not my machine)?