Who knows their iMac stuff hardcore? Incredibly perplexing issue...

[mach1andy]

A co-worker's G4 700 mhz iMac was running 10.2.8 and was having problems loading pictures etc, so I volunteered to upgrade her to Tiger so she could catch up (her system meets the requirements and has 768 ram) but after inserting the disc and going through the first steps after boot the machine would say "Disc cannot be installed on this volume".

After an hour of fiddling around, I decided to hook her machine up via firewire and "Target" boot it and erase her hard drive from another co-worker's ibook. After that, I tried again with the disk and no deal.

So I had to install 10.2.0 from scratch and after that I again tried with the family pack OSX 10.4 disc and still no dice.

What am I doing wrong?? Am I not allowed to jump from 10.2 to 10.4 directly? Is their a firmware update I should know about for this 5 year old machine?

 

[72930]

Am I not allowed to jump from 10.2 to 10.4 directly?

No idea about the rest, but one can do this.

 

[Blue Velvet]

When you erased the drive, how exactly did you format it?

 

[mkrishnan]

When you erased the drive, how exactly did you format it?

That's what I'm wondering about... is it in the correct filesystem for Tiger (MacOS Extended / Journaled)?

 

[mopppish]

What disc are you using for the Tiger install?
Is it a legit copy of Tiger?
If you're trying to install from a system restore disc that came with a machine, it won't let you do that (legally).
System restore discs since Tiger have been model specific- you can only install it on the kind of machine it came with.
Sorry if this is something already obvious to you.

 

[mach1andy]

Not only did I use a legit version of Tiger but I also formatted the drive in Mac OS extended (journaled). When I tried to install OS 10.4 after the format, it wouldn't recognize the disk (even when holding option or c-- seperately of course). What else could be wrong///

 

[mkrishnan]

Maybe I'm missing something, but since you've got target disk mode working, why don't you install Tiger via Target Disk Mode from the iBook?

 

[Peace]

Try booting from the Tiger disc and use disk utility to verify the hard drive.

 

[mach1andy]

Sounds like a solution mkrishnan!

Would I hook up the imac again in Target Mode and install the disc into the ibook and when it prompts me to install, I just choose the imac?

Anything sticky about it?? This may be a great workaround...!

 

[Maxwell Smart]

yeah, simply connect the iMac in target disk mode and then boot up the ibook from the CD-ROM, it should detect the other drive and allow you to install the OS on it from the iBook. Good luck

 

[mach1andy]

I'm giving it a whirl right now... I'll post an update in an hour!

 

[mkrishnan]

Good luck! Just make sure you pick the right drive!

 

[mach1andy]

Great job mkrishnan! It worked! Thanks for everyone's comments-- I can always rely on macrumors' community for techie questions!

 

[mkrishnan]

Now that I think about this more, too, it reminded me of installing Tiger on my iBook. For some reason, no keyboard shortcut works (or at least at that time, worked) to bring the computer up from DVD. I tried several times and was getting quite upset. Then finally, I used the system preferences Startup Disk pane and this worked fine. So for future reference with that Mac, for whatever reason, it too may require an optical disc being selected in this fashion?

What I'm supposed to do if my hard drive goes wonky and won't boot, however, I'm not so clear....