Install Tiger in iBook G3 using iMac G5 DVD Disc

  It has been a long time since my last post here. Really get nothing to write! During this period i was using the Ubuntu Linux 5.04 for PPC. It is good and not good enough for me to drop my Mac OS X. So last friday i decided to swich back to Mac OS X 10.4. The probelm is that i didnt have the Tiger installation CD/DVD or any other kinds of source. But i get two friends both get iMac G5(Wuvist/Rex).

   It turns out that Rex has went back to China(Not sure about this, just know that his phone is not available), so i approached Wuvist. I used him iMac to restore the DVD disc to my firewire harddisk. I thought the remaining steps should be like a piece of cake, because i have done such thing before.(Check this out) Things came out to be a little bit difficult.

   The problem is that all machine coming system discs are machine specific, can only be installed on their specific machines!

   After some Google search, i finally got problem solved!

Step 1: Plug in your firewire harddisk(with Tiger Installation DVD image restored).

Step 2: Navigate to System/Installation/Packages and find OSinstall.mpkg

Step 3: Right click on OSinstall.mpkg and chose "Show package contents" go to Content and find OSinstall.plist. Open it with TextEdit.

Step 4: Find the section contains "

function checkSupportedMachine(machineType){

var badMachines = [iMac,.............];

Change it to

function checkSupportedMachine(machineType){

var badMachines = [];

In other words, delete all text inside [].

Step 5: inside the TextEdit, Press apple+F, replace all "false" with "true", save the file and exit the TextEdit.

Step 6: Restart the system and boot from your firewire harddisk and start the installation.

   In fact the install DVD will use the OSinstall.plist file to check the machine profile, what we do is just erase all the "badmachine" check machenism. In this sense, this DVD image can be used in any Mac.

   Hope this can help somebody!