I have a 1.0Ghz PowerBook G4 (model A1025, with FireWire) with 1GB RAM I'm trying to install Tiger on, with the Tiger OS X install DVD. It's currently running OS X 10.2.8.

Although this machine will read the DVD fine under 10.2.8 to allow the installer to be launched, when the PB restarts it gets only as far as the Apple logo screen with the spinning sundial and seems to hang there. The sundial will continue to spin, but I've let it run for 30 minutes this way and it never boots from the DVD.

Perhaps the DVD is bad, but it also won't boot the latest DiskWarrior disk either. That hangs the sundial eventually and stops it spinning.

Any ideas about how I could get this to work? I have access to an external FireWire hard drive with a SuperDuper copy of Tiger on it backed up from a G5 iMac, as well as the G5 iMac itself. Ditto for a Dual PowerMac G4. Is Target Disk Mode an option here? If so, how would I go about making that work with the Tiger installer disk?

Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!

you could try verbose boot and see if anything useful comes up. hold c until you see the apple, and then immediately release that and hold apple and v until you get text.

probably an optical drive problem or bad memory.

or try running the hardware test disc

Well, oddly enough, starting from verbose mode allowed the Tiger installer to boot the disk. It's now going through the "Checking your Installation DVD" process. If that fails I guess I can be relatively sure that a bad installer DVD is the issue.

I'll report back soon.

Success! Whether by chance or something about verbose mode, your suggestion allowed Tiger to boot and install from the DVD without a hitch.

I had tried it at least 3 times using the C key method and a regular boot, and I even made it the startup disk once and tried booting that way as well, but no joy.

Thanks for your help!

Why starting in verbose mode would make a difference, to quote Yul Bryner in his famous movie and stage role as the King of Siam, "It is a puzzlement". But at least it worked.

Hello, Rick

It is good to read of your success. I am adding this link in response to in case it might be a useful resource for other readers who may or may not have a DVD-challenged Mac but might need to install using Target Disk Mode.

Installing OS X 10.4 ‘Tiger’ on DVD-Challenged Macs Using FireWire Target Disk Mode

I'm more interested that my suggestion worked so completely. I was under the impression that a verbose boot caused somethingorother that the installer needed to not load, and prevented successful installation... owell, don't ask, don't tell, whatever, it worked, who cares. congrats

I was certainly puzzled that it worked too. In fact, I fully expected the DVD verification process to fail after starting the installer. I thought for sure the installer disk must be bad since it had failed to boot previously, but it all worked like a champ.