Difficulty Upgrading iMac G4 from Panther to Tiger

bryanambition

New Tinkerer
Oct 19, 2022
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London, UK
bryanambition.com
Hey all!
Yesterday I had a triumph: I burned OS X Panther .toast files to CDs and managed to upgrade my G4 successfully. Yay!

However, I tried doing the same with OS X Tiger CDs, and it won't work. At first the G4 refused to recognize the CD. Then I tried to restart holding down C, and although it didn't give me the option to choose a boot disk, by the time it loaded the desktop (as normal) a finder window was open with the Tiger upgrade, ready to go. I clicked on it, the computer restarted, but no installation took place.

Am I missing something? The only thing I can think of is maybe I should've burned the Tiger .toast files onto DVDs instead of CDs, but why would that make a difference?

Any tips would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! ;-)
 
The CD version of Tiger on the Mac Garden is good. IIRC it consisted of 4 CD images, of which you only really need 2 or 3 to get a basic Tiger installation up. (the rest is printer drivers and additional languages I think)

I did use the CD installer many times before and it worked fine for me, so I'd rule out a problem with it. There shouldn't be a need to go DVD. By your description of having "a finder window pop up" after booting I take the CD was recognized and mounted on the Desktop?

What happens when you boot and hold down the option key? Does the CD come up ? If yes, choose to boot from it. It will boot straight to the installer (will take some time). If not, I wonder if the CD is any good (can you confirm it working on 2nd Mac?) or your optical drive may be on the way out.
 

bryanambition

New Tinkerer
Oct 19, 2022
18
4
3
London, UK
bryanambition.com
Hey thanks so much for the reply! I actually sorted it out by trying a "better" brand of blank CDs. Someone on Reddit had suggested maybe it was the quality of the CDs, and because I'd done everything else the same before, I sprang for a new batch and sure enough it worked! ;-)
 
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