Installing Leopard from an Intel Mac
From Eric Holtam:
I can confirm that you can use an Intel Mac to install Leopard on a
pre-867 MHz G4. I have a dual 800
Quicksilver that I installed the Leo GM on. Things you need:
- FireWire cable
- Bootable PPC system
- 1 extra physical hard drive with an empty partition on the existing
PPC boot drive or 2 extra hard drives in PPC system (internal or
external)
Boot the PPC machine into FireWire Target Disk mode and connect it
to the Intel Mac. Boot the Intel off the Leopard DVD. When you get to
the installer, you'll notice that the drives of the PPC machine aren't
available. You need to launch Disk Utility from the menu and format one
of the two drives using GUID for the Intel machine. That is the drive
you will install Leopard onto.
Once the install is done, reboot the PPC machine into the previous
bootable system. Once logged in, launch Disk Utility and format the
other drive/partition as HFS+. Then use the Restore function of Disk
Utility to clone the Leopard install from the GUID drive to HFS+ drive.
Change the startup disk to the newly cloned drive, and you've got
Leopard on the PPC machine. You can remove the GUID formatted drive
when complete.
-Eric
Eric,
Whod'a thunk it - you can clone a Leopard install
without using Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! And you can create a
PowerPC bootable drive using an Intel Mac, something I hadn't even
hoped for.
Thank you, Apple!
BTW, how well does Leopard work on your Quicksilver?
Faster than Tiger? Is the graphics card up to the task?
Dan
Yeah, its kinda crazy what you have to go thru to do it, but it's
still possible. I thought for sure that since the installer didn't work
that there would be some sort of road block in the actual OS as well.
Guess not!
I have 1.5 GB of RAM in the machine, and it runs about the same as
Tiger. No significant improvements overall. My video card is the same
stock card that came with the machine. I didn't have any Quartz Extreme
functionality in Tiger with it either. The transparencies and Core
Animations still function though. For instance with Remote Desktop 3.2,
the fade into controlling a remote machine is smooth. There are some
slowdowns here and there with some of the eye candy stuff, but I try
and avoid that anyway.
iPhoto seems to have taken a step backward in speed. It takes a
looooong time to load/manage my library of 11,000+ photos. But as an
everyday machine, it's fully functional. It's so frustrating that
there's no technological reason to limit the specs of Leopard. Earlier
builds of Leo had a minimum requirement of 800 MHz. The last few builds
they decided to up that with no explanation. At least there is a
workaround for us LEM-ers.
-Eric
Thanks for the follow-up, Eric.
Video Card Options for AGP Power Macs
From Ryan Hanson:
Hi,
I looked into this just last week. There is a seller on eBay,
Applemacanix, who
is flashing PC/Win video cards for use in older Macs. I bought one a
few weeks ago for my Cube, and it works okay.
Here was my question:
I am looking for a video card to go into my G4 Sawtooth with Core Image support so I can
load Leopard on it. However, I don't want to fool around with
scotch-taping the board or anything like I saw in the instructions that
came with the Mac ATI Radeon 7500 64 MB AGP Video Card DVI G4/G5 7000
that I bought from you guys a couple of weeks ago. Is there a card that
I can buy that will work without modification and run Leopard with all
the graphic bells and whistles on my G4 Sawtooth?
And here was the answer:
We have three video cards that will work with your
Sawtooth and support Core Image; all three of them require tape in a 4x
AGP G4, as they are 8x AGP cards, but all of our cards come pre-taped;
the good news is that tape is not required in a Sawtooth, as it
is a 2x AGP machine, so if you bought any of these three cards for your
Sawtooth, you could either just leave the tape in place, or remove the
tape and clean any adhesive off the connectors with a bit of rubbing
alcohol.
Here are the three video cards:
- GeForce 6200 256 MB AGP - low power consumption, completely silent,
runs cool, no auxiliary power connection needed
- Radeon 9700 Pro 128 MB AGP - uses a bit more power and produces
more heat than the 6200, but quite a bump in speed/power, requires
auxiliary power connection
- Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB AGP - fastest card for the Sawtooth; uses
more power and runs warmer than the 9700; requires auxiliary power
connection
I guess I should note there is always some risk when you start
mucking around with your computers and doing upgrades like this. Do
this at your own risk!
Ryan Hanson
Ryan,
Thanks for the info. I did a little research on Bare
Feats, and they report no performance difference between the 9800 Pro
($109) and 9700 Pro ($149), so that can save Mac owners a few bucks. I
haven't seen any head-to-head comparisons with the GeForce 6200 ($99),
but online users claim the Radeons are much faster, making the 9700 Pro
the best value for adding full Core Image support to an older Mac.
Dan
Guide to Mac AGP Video Cards
Hi Dan,
Your guide to Mac-compatible AGP video cards is a good idea but
someone has already done it.
<http://themacelite.wikidot.com/compatibility>
They list AGP-compatible video cards from ATI and Nvidia for G4s and
G5s.
Rudy
Rudy,
Yes, The Mac Elite does a wonderful job in this area,
and they are definitely the leading resource on flashing Windows video
cards for use in the Mac, but their profiles are geared to flashed
versions of these video cards, not Mac Edition video cards.
As we slowly build our own guide to AGP video cards
for Power Macs, we'll be sure to link to the excellent resources on The
Mac Elite website.
Dan
Leopard Runs Well on a Digital Audio G4
From Paul C. Harvey:
Dan,
My main desktop Mac is a Digital Audio
G4 (originally 733 MHz) upgraded to a 1.42 GHz Sonnet G4 with 1.5
GB of RAM. I have upgraded this computer just about as much as I can,
but because it has performed flawlessly for so long I will not part
with it until it dies (or can afford a new Intel Mac Pro). I have multiple external FireWire
800 drives attached to this machine. Also I have an iBook G4 1.2 GHz.
Leopard would not install on the desktop, but everything went well
with the iBook. I cloned that using Target Disk Mode to one of my
FireWire partitions. I then booted into Tiger on the desktop and cloned
Leopard to my main boot disk, a 500 GB SATA drive running off a PCI
card. Rebooted and the Digital Audio continues on!
Other than some minor problems, it performs better than Tiger. Once
Spotlight finished its indexing, the computer is more responsive and
just seems snappier. The Finder is particularly speedy compared to
Tiger. I know this is anecdotal, but I trust my perceptions with this
computer.
One oddity is that About this Mac believes I am running a 0 GHz
Power PC, although System Profiler shows it correctly.
All in all, I am very pleased so far.
Thank you,
Paul C. Harvey
Paul,
Thanks for sharing your findings. It's great to read
so many reports of Leopard running well on unsupported hardware, even
if you need a supported Mac to get it there. It's especially nice to
hear that users feel it is more responsive than Tiger, which is pretty
responsive itself.
Do you still have the original Nvidia GeForce 2 MX
video card in your Digital Audio Power Mac?
Dan
Dan,
No it's the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256 MB Mac Edition. I have had it
about a year, and it has been fine for this computer. Certainly has
been surpassed by the latest greatest cards of today, but still
respectable.
Thanks,
Paul
Paul,
Thanks for the update! Nice to have a video card with
Core Image support. :-)
Dan
Leopard on a 500 MHz Dual Processor Mac
From Brian Deuel:
Hey Dan,
ComputerLand on 28th Street! I used to ride my bike up there to play
around with the Apple IIs and buy ribbons for my Atari 800's printer!
You might remember me; I had some pretty wild spiked up hair (this was
the heavy metal 80s, after all)! I'm still here in Grand Rapids, living
not far from that old strip mall!
Anyway, having read the article about modifying the Leopard install
DVD and checking out the forum post at on Mac Rumors, I
decided to give it a try on my DP 500 MHz
Mystic. And I am proud to say, I've succeeded! I followed the
entire post to the T, except that, rather than burning the image to a
DL-DVD, I restored the image to a spare 20 gig drive I had laying
around. I connected another spare 20 gig drive as the master drive,
booted my Leopard DVD, set the spare drive as the startup drive, and
rebooted. The install went off without a hitch, and Leopard actually
runs pretty decently on this old workhorse, if a tad slower than Tiger.
Now if only my flashed GeForce 6200 would allow it to boot so I could
see how she really runs with Core Image/Core Video
hardware-enabled (stuck with an old GeForce 2). I'm going to play around
for a while before I decide whether to install Leopard on my main
drive.
A photo of the About The Mac can be found online.
I love Low End Mac and have been reading it since 2002, when I got
my first Mac (a B&W 450). Keep up the
great work!
Brian Deuel
Brian,
Thanks for writing. I only worked at the 28th Street
location for about six months in late 1982 - and later at the Broadmoor
location until about 6 months before the store closed its doors. I
remember going in to drool over the Apple II+, pick up BYTE,
Creative Computing, and Computer! magazines, and dreaming of
the day I could afford a computer. (My first one was a Commodore
VIC-20.)
Congratulations on hacking the installer and getting
Leopard running on your dual 500 MHz G4. I've got a dual 450 I'd like
to try it on once I acquire a copy of 10.5. You're the first one to
report that Leopard feels a bit slower than Tiger. I wonder if that
could be because it's still doing its Spotlight index.
Best of luck with the GeForce 6200.
Dan
Ahh . . . late '82 was probably too late for me then. I
used to love those magazines too, especially Byte! It seemed to be the
only magazine that had anything with TRS-80 Model III stuff (our high
school had those in their computer lab).
Leopard just feels "not as snappy" with certain things, such as the
new Dock and some of the effects. I get weird video glitches (i.e., my
screen "freaks out" momentarily) when I have a Finder window open and
have the view set to Cover Flow and I minimize a window to the Dock,
but that could be due to the GeForce 2 with 32 megs RAM I had to default
to for now. In fact, I used the same card in this machine for a long
time, and even Tiger felt like it was dragging a bit until I installed
the 6200 I flashed a few months ago. So I'm wondering if it's just the
card itself that's dragging things down.
Spotlight indexing only took 10 minutes on this machine, but then
again, the test drives I have installed are both 20 gigs.
It doesn't appear that I have the same sleep issues that others have
reported having. The beast awoke from her nap just fine :)
I'm going to dig in and put Leopard through the ringer over the next
few days. I'll report back my findings.
Good luck with your install.
Brian
Followed by another email some time
later:
Dan,
The Mac Elite comes through again!!
Turns out that at first boot with the later GeForce series of video
cards, there can be a wait of up to two minutes for the desktop to
appear, all the while the spinning dashes stop. Then Leopard springs to
life. Seems I was a bit impatient :)
Everything is much more snappy with the 6200. Cover Flow,
Stacks, DVD Player, etc., all run fine, and seemingly (so far) faster
than Tiger. A couple more days of playing around, and I'll probably
install it as my main OS.
Take care - Brian
Brian,
Good news indeed!
Dan
Leopard on the PowerBook G4/400
From Ryan:
Hi,
I successfully installed Leopard on a PowerBook G4 400 MHz machine via FireWire Disk
Mode. Of course there are no video drivers for the ATI Rage 128
graphics card used in the PowerBook G4. I tried using an ATI Rage 128
kext file from Jaguar 10.2 and installing it in the /System/
Library/Extensions folder in Leopard under root by dragging it over top
the extensions folder, but an error came up saying it was improperly
installed. I did refresh the kext file via root and restarted the
computer, but the same error message came up saying the kext file
cannot be used as it was improperly installed.
Anybody want to try and take a crack at this? It would really help
put some juice back in these older G4 PowerBooks, because there is no
video card support to speak of Leopard. With some video support, it
will be just fine, because the G4 chip rocks in Leopard. Right now
videos are completely choppy.
Regards,
Ryan
Ryan,
Thanks for writing. You're the first to report success
using FireWire Disk Mode to install Leopard on an unsupported Mac. We'd
suspected it would work; thanks for the confirmation.
As for support for the ancient Rage 128 graphics
processor, don't expect anything from Apple. However, it's possible the
user community may come through on this one. I'll post your letter in
the Mailbag; maybe someone will see it and point us to a driver.
Dan
Dan Knight has been publishing Low
End Mac since April 1997. Mailbag columns come from email responses to his Mac Musings, Mac Daniel, Online Tech Journal, and other columns on the site.
