Hello everybody ! Many people have some old apple computers laying around in their attic or somewhere else, and probably, one day, decide to try and revive them. If you are one of those people with a G3, G4 or G5 Mac, and don’t want to bother yourself with trying to find old installer CDs, I will show you how you can install Mac OS 10.3 (not tested), 10.4 and 10.5 on your PowerPC from a USB stick. Now you may think that you already can do that by just holding the Alt key, but these machines are a bit too old for that. Thats why we gotta force them, through Open Firmware Mode !
Things you´ll need:
- A PowerPC Mac with a G3, G4 or G5 processor
- A modern intel Mac
- A 4gb or larger (8gb recommended) USB stick
- A copy of Mac OS 10.3, 10.4 or 10.5
- A tiny bit of patience !
- Panther minimal requirements: 233mhz G3 processor and 128mb of RAM
- Tiger minimal requirements: 300mhz G3 processor and 256mb of RAM
- Leopard minimal requirements: 867mhz G4 processor and 512mb of RAM
Operating system: The original system comes with Mac OS X 10.3. The operating system can be upgraded to MAC OS X 10.5.8. The operating system can be upgraded to MAC OS X 10.5.8. Drives: The iMAc G5 has a slot-loading optical drive with 24x CD and 8x DVD read/write speed and a 7200 RPM SATA hard drive (available in 80GB, 160GB, or 250GB memory. HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. UPDATE 7/27/2015: Official download link has been fixed. System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.5 or later, PowerPC G4 or G5. After doing a lot of research and trying out some hints, finally I could install Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on an iMac G5 1.8 GHz, and I would like to share with you the solution that I got. This works for PowerPC Macs that don't have a Dual Layer DVD, and you wish to install Leopard using an external USB Drive instead. The PowerPC and Intel Macs are totally different architectures, so you are correct, you could only really emulate a PowerPC install on an intel machine, versus virtualize Windows/Mac OS/Linux on a intel machine. There are some PowerPC emulators, but the one I know of for OS X would be PearPC. Vmware for the mac. I have used PearPC a very long time ago, and don't.
My original testbed was a Late 2005 2.3 GHz Power Mac G5 Dual with 3 GB of RAM and two hard drives, one with OS X 10.4 Tiger, the other with OS X 10.5 Leopard.It’s my most powerful PowerPC Mac, so I figured it would be a good way to take Linux for a spin.
Here are the download links to Mac OS 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5:
- 10.3: https://winworldpc.com/product/mac-os-x/103 (10.3 is in 3 separate parts and is very difficult to install from USB. You should better burn 3 CDs with the files.)
- 10.4: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byhts_pMay1hUnRlS1M4WDBLd28/view
- 10.5: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byhts_pMay1hWHdyOWhGd1Vkdnc/view
So, to start off, download the version of your choice. I would recommend first trying 10.4, because it is compatible with more Macs. Once you downloaded Tiger (the name of Mac OS 10.4). You want to plug your USB stick into your intel Mac, open Disk Utility, and format it as Apple Partition Map with the name USB. Once done, restore your stick from the Tiger dmg. You may need to scan the image, for that, whilst in disk utility, go into ‘images’ and select the top option. After the restoring process is done, right click on your usb in disk utility (left side, where every disk is shown) and look for its partition number. Could be 3,2,1 and so on. Now you can eject your usb, and plug it into your PowerPC. Make sure that it is the only USB device, except for your keyboard and mouse. Now comes the fun part ?
Congrats ! You’ve made it until here ! Hopefully without any problems. But that was the easiest part; now starts the more difficult part, if you don’t know what you’re doing. First things first, to start your Mac into OF mode, you need to turn it on, and immediately hold ‘command’, ‘Alt’, O and F all together. Hold those 4 keys down, until you see the screen shown above. After you successfully booted your Mac, you gonna wanna type ‘dev / ls’ and hit enter. Now there will be a long list of all the stuff inside of your computer. At the end of the list you will most likely see something like ‘More (space, cr,q) and so on. Just press space once. Now at the end there should be ‘0’ with an arrow and underscore. Before typing any other stuff, you will have to find your usb in the list. It should be towards the end and look something like this:
Your USB will be /usb@xx (here usb@18) and below there should be /disk@xx (here disk@1). Are you ready to type now ? Alright then, let’s go !! ( Tip: press the up key to prevent rewriting everything )
After each line press Enter
- /pci@f2000000/usb@xx/disk@xx
- devalias ud /pci@f2000000/usb@xx/disk@xx
- dir ud:x, (instead of x write the partition number of your usb)
If everything went right, there now should be a list of the stuff that’s on your usb. Now type:
- boot ud:x,SystemLibraryCoreServicesBootX
If you typed everything like shown, your Mac should now happily boot from the USB ! You can now continue without me, and install OS X on your old machine, assuming it has enough RAM, and is compatible with your Mac ! If you encounter any issues, or something is unclear, just comment down below, write me a DM on instagram @idevice_collector or email me: [email protected]. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, and we will see us in the next one !
-Gohro
0 - THANK YOU to all who came before on this hint/thread/comment.. i am just standing on top of the giants before and adding my little comments for others..
1 - i could not make a windows-keyboard work.. in particular, my imac (g5) would 'ask' about it when powering up by having me press the key 'just inside of shift key' on each side.. thus, i was never able to make the keyboard-combo work correctly.. if you cannot get into open-firmware, then try getting a normal MAC-keyboard..
2 - i was having all sorts of problems trying to get the correct device to use for the 'dir' command.. i could see the tree of information, but could never make a working 'devalias' for myself.. two clues:
3 - i was finally able to get things working better by doing/trying the following (details removed for hopeful-clarity):
4 - once i got my magic incantation correct, it took prolly an hour to get thru the first-boot - but eventually i got the great happy-mac sound from the other room.. hopefully you will be able to too.. :)