Restoring a Quicksilver

[svanimpe]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to restore a PowerMac G4 Quicksilver back to a usable state with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

The hardware seems to work fine, but I'm having a lot of issues upgrading the software:

• I have the machine's restore disks, which installed both OS 9.2 and OS X 10.0.
• I first tried to burn the Tiger DVD ISO on a new machine (macOS 26 with an external drive), but it didn't recognize the image. I had the same issue using Brasero on Ubuntu, so I will need to burn the image on the Quicksilver itself (which has a SuperDrive).
• The download speeds on this machine are extremely slow. Max 50KB/s, but can go as low as 1KB/s, which makes it really time-consuming to try things out.
• Neither OS 9 or OS X 10.0 seem to recognize USB sticks formatted as HFS+ with the Apple Partition Map. I tried to install the USB Mass Storage driver, but it was a self-mounted image, which also didn't work (error -39).

So,

1. Any tips on burning a bootable Tiger DVD on a different machine?
2. Any tips on fixing the slow network speeds?
3. Any tips on getting USB sticks to work on OS 9?

Also, any tips on hardware maintenance tasks I can perform to make sure this machine can keep working for many more years to come?

• I usually just remove as much dirt as possible, replace the thermal paste, and the PRAM battery.
• The machine still has the original hard drive. Should I keep it around for as long as it'll work, or should an SSD run much quieter?
• Do y'all just clean the fans, or replace them?

 

[phunguss]

Any tips on burning a bootable Tiger DVD on a different machine?

What type of media are you using? Some readers/burners have different wavelength of lasers so they do not like certain + or - media, and if you are using RW, that may be an issue as well.

 

[svanimpe]

I have both DVD-Rs and DVD+Rs. The machine seems to be quite finicky when reading discs (at least in OS 9). Sometimes it doesn't even detect there's a disc in the drive, other times, it reads and writes the same disc just fine

Update: I've finally gotten Tiger installed by burning the Toast installers and Tiger ISO to a DVD, and copying it over that way.