Extracting Tiger from revovery DVD

[jonnyfatman]

I recently bought a copy of Mac OS X Tiger from a bloke off Ebay for £35. I have a mac mini running Panther, but it states 'iBook G4' on the install DVD.

Is it possible to extract the Tiger install from the DVD to make it work on my mini, or even fool the disk into thinking my mini is actually an ibook?

Cheers,

Jonny

[A Nonny Moose]

You can extract the information by having the Finder show hidden files via TinkerTool, but what you're doing is bordering on illegal.

[pluggulp]

Nonny Moose: That depends very much on what jurisdiction you are in. If you buy an original install DVD second hand, you have all rights to use it in many jurisdictions, probably in most of the EU.

[jonnyfatman]

Nonny Moose: That depends very much on what jurisdiction you are in. If you buy an original install DVD second hand, you have all rights to use it in many jurisdictions, probably in most of the EU.

 

Ok. So temporarily disregarding any legal difficulties for the moment. Assume the install DVD has come from an ibook G4 that someone accidentally set on fire. There ya go. Frees up the DVD for me

 

I can now see a list of pkg files in system/installation/packages/

 

I'm assuming those are the files that I need. What's the difference between a recovery DVD and a normal Tiger install DVD?

 

I need to know what it does when it checks that the computer it's installing on is a ibook. Is there a pref file somwhere I can alter, then re-burn a bootable image of the installer DVD to work off?

 

Thanks for your help so far

[A Nonny Moose]

A recovery DVD is system specific, meaning it will only run on the system it was intended for. I've heard a lot of rumors saying they will also make your system inherently unstable because of this, but I've never seen it happen in the wild, so take it with a small grain of salt. It will also specifically say "System Restore" on the DVD in addition to all of that.

 

If it says "iMac G4 Mac OS X install" or something like that, then you have a Mac OS X installation disk, which means you can reboot from the disk and install OS X. Going off of what you're saying, I'd bet you have an OS X install disk. See if you can reboot from the CD by going to the startup disk preference pane.

[Colonel]

i keep getting an error that says "Cant install base system on this machine"

what should i do?

[Alex Oughton]

edit: Never mind. I just read that you're currently running Panther, making my point irrelevant.

[bluedragon1971]

You can modify a file on the DVD to ignore the model check, but this will require burning a new copy of the DVD. First you will have to make an image of the Restore DVD. Mount this image as read-write.

 

The file you are looking for is in /System/Installation/Packages on the DVD. Modify the file "OSInstall.mpgk/Contents/OSInstall.dist" with your text editor and change the JavaScript function "hwbeModelCheck" so that it returns the value true:

 

<script>function hwbeModelCheck() {

return true;

...

 

After you have done that, burn the image back to a disc, and you should be able to install it to any type of Mac.