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fivebucksemac

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 3, 2017
6
0
Hello guys,
I just bought an eMac from 2004 and decided to swap out the old HDD and replace it with a "new" one. Because I personally use a Windows-PC, I needed to burn a Leopard-DVD via TransMac. I inserted the DVD and booted the mac by holding down the Option-Key (Alt-Key on my Windows-Keyboard). Now it's just showing a blue screen with two arrows. One of it seems to refresh and the other one is pointing to the right. Nothing happens when I click on it. What should I do now?
 

KawaiiAurora

macrumors 6502
Dec 16, 2016
307
190
Europa
Hello guys,
I just bought an eMac from 2004 and decided to swap out the old HDD and replace it with a "new" one. Because I personally use a Windows-PC, I needed to burn a Leopard-DVD via TransMac. I inserted the DVD and booted the mac by holding down the Option-Key (Alt-Key on my Windows-Keyboard). Now it's just showing a blue screen with two arrows. One of it seems to refresh and the other one is pointing to the right. Nothing happens when I click on it. What should I do now?

It's not finding the DVD then. Did you try booting up via pressing the 'c' key?
 

QSDP-User

macrumors regular
Jan 13, 2015
144
89
California, USA
Yeah, it's not seeing the DVD installer at all.
Burning a working Mac-bootable installer disc without Mac hardware/software gets kinda dicey.
The ones & zeros of boot-abilty seem open to the littlest corruption.
And sometimes even with just a Mac-born image:
i.e., an image that was mounted, but should have been "locked" first.
I've seen warnings about that but don't know the corruption involved.

Maybe Transmac would work better making a bootable USB thumb drive as the installer.
If that's possible, then you can google "Booting PowerPC Mac with USB" for the OpenFirmware technique of booting via USB.
Should work with an eMac 2004.

By the way, I like your account name ;)
 

DeltaMac

macrumors G5
Jul 30, 2003
13,767
4,591
Delaware
The flashing folder/? means that your eMac can't find any bootable system.

Hmm... transmac should work, but creating a Mac bootable DVD on Windows can be problematical (the problem is making the DVD properly bootable, which is what you are experiencing)
Where did you get your disk image for Leopard? If you got a torrent somewhere - try another one. Can't give you any help on that. OR, better, find a real Leopard installer DVD. Still available on eBay, some on Amazon, etc.

Leopard, in my experience, doesn't always make a bootable DVD, even if you use a proper Mac to make it.
Try burning another DVD. It's not an easy thing to waste those dual-layer DVD-Rs, but it's part of the game when you want to make a bootable Leopard installer DVD. Double-check your settings in transmac (I don't use that, just something to try.)

Is the PowerBook G4 working? Maybe that can be helpful, if it has a dual-layer burner, to get your installer DVD made correctly.
 

fivebucksemac

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 3, 2017
6
0
The flashing folder/? means that your eMac can't find any bootable system.

Hmm... transmac should work, but creating a Mac bootable DVD on Windows can be problematical (the problem is making the DVD properly bootable, which is what you are experiencing)
Where did you get your disk image for Leopard? If you got a torrent somewhere - try another one. Can't give you any help on that. OR, better, find a real Leopard installer DVD. Still available on eBay, some on Amazon, etc.

Leopard, in my experience, doesn't always make a bootable DVD, even if you use a proper Mac to make it.
Try burning another DVD. It's not an easy thing to waste those dual-layer DVD-Rs, but it's part of the game when you want to make a bootable Leopard installer DVD. Double-check your settings in transmac (I don't use that, just something to try.)

Is the PowerBook G4 working? Maybe that can be helpful, if it has a dual-layer burner, to get your installer DVD made correctly.


I just burned a Leopard-.dmg from somewhere on the DVD. No Torrents.
Unfortunately idk if it's working because I don't have a charger, but a friend is coming soon and brings a charger and a PBG417 with a dual layer burner. Hopefully.
 

DeltaMac

macrumors G5
Jul 30, 2003
13,767
4,591
Delaware
Hmmm...
Try downloading the 10.5.4 image from HERE.
(it's the one that is 6.4GB in size. NOT the 10.5.8 updater, which is, well, just an updater for an already-installed Leopard system)
I know it is a good disk image, as I used it to burn to a DVD a month or two back. Booted my eMac just fine.

I have an eMac here that is my grand experiment. SSD, with an SATA to IDE bridge board. Freezes up (a lot), particularly when waking from sleep, or a couple of boots from completely off.
Once it successfully boots up, I use it for a DVD burner, and a good amount of random internet browsing. If I don't sleep it, or shut off, it continues to work very nicely. I have a non-Apple DVD burner in that, which is MUCH faster than any superdrive that Apple ever supplied for an eMac. It does a really nice job of the various needs that I have for copying DVDs and CDs, plus the SSD makes it all Snappy™ :D
 

fivebucksemac

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 3, 2017
6
0
Hmmm...
Try downloading the 10.5.4 image from HERE.
(it's the one that is 6.4GB in size. NOT the 10.5.8 updater, which is, well, just an updater for an already-installed Leopard system)
I know it is a good disk image, as I used it to burn to a DVD a month or two back. Booted my eMac just fine.

I have an eMac here that is my grand experiment. SSD, with an SATA to IDE bridge board. Freezes up (a lot), particularly when waking from sleep, or a couple of boots from completely off.
Once it successfully boots up, I use it for a DVD burner, and a good amount of random internet browsing. If I don't sleep it, or shut off, it continues to work very nicely. I have a non-Apple DVD burner in that, which is MUCH faster than any superdrive that Apple ever supplied for an eMac. It does a really nice job of the various needs that I have for copying DVDs and CDs, plus the SSD makes it all Snappy™ :D

Thank you, but I have no idea how to get those 6.4GB on a disc. Booting the eMac via USB doesn't seem to work, beause it's USB 1.1 (I guess...)
 

KawaiiAurora

macrumors 6502
Dec 16, 2016
307
190
Europa
Thank you, but I have no idea how to get those 6.4GB on a disc. Booting the eMac via USB doesn't seem to work, beause it's USB 1.1 (I guess...)

Well, I took the lazy way. Downloaded a fully updated 10.5.8 DMG, put that on an HFS+ pendrive , put in the Tiger DVD, restored that and viola. Alternatively, you can make 2 partitons, install Tiger on one, download the 10.5.4 DMG, restore it to the other partition, boot from that, install Leopard and nuke Tiger.
 

amagichnich

macrumors 6502a
Feb 3, 2017
516
342
Stuttgart, Germany
When I started with PowerMacs two years ago I had the exact same problem as you have it. With no other Mac available it's hard to do that but it is possible.
My solution was a bit complicated...

Prerequisites:
Windows PC
Hackintosh VMware image
Leopard image
External IDE Harddrive (USB or Firewire)

As the earlier eMacs can't read DoubleLayer DVDs you can't use a DVD to do it.
1. I downloaded a preconfigured Snow Leopard VMware image and used that on my Windows machine.
2. In the virtual OS X I downloaded the Leopard image.
3. Then I made the external harddrive available for the virtual machine and restored the Leopard image via DiskUtility to the harddrive.
4. After that I opened the eMac, took the IDE drive out of the exteral case and replaced the eMacs DVD drive with the IDE hdd
5. Then I booted the Leopard installer from the second hdd and installed it to the first hdd
6. Replaced the second hdd with the DVD drive afterwards
7. Acquired an external Firewire drive, partitioned it and restored the Leopard image to one partition as an installer for future Powermac acquisitions

That is really no optimal procedure but if there are no other ways it is at least a way of doing it.

I'd say if you want to survive in the PPC world you definitely need a Firewire drive and at least two Macs. So if I was you I would wait for your friends PB and do the wholel thing a much more simple way
 
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