Is it possible to install Leopard to a Mac G5 with no DVD drive?

[leglez]

The company I work for just recently opened an electronics recycling facility. The tech guy goes up to the facility and goes through the towers and pulls parts from them. Yesterday he went and found a Mac G5 in really good condition. He tried booting it, but it wouldn't boot spinning apple logo. So I brought in my old copy of Leopard to see if I could get it to boot with that. Then realized the DVD drive was jammed. We couldn't use the emergency release either. We finally got it opened to find a Epson printer disc mangled inside of it. Obviously the DVD drive does not work. We tried plugging in an external DVD drive to boot from it, but no luck.

He said he will be going back to the facility next Wednesday and can look for a DVD drive. Until then though is there anyway for us to try to install leopard to see if it is even working?

I copied my Leopard install disc to my hackintosh, and I brought the G5 hard drive home with me tonight. Can I restore the leopard disc to the G5 hard drive and just boot it up in the G5?

 

[TheStu]

Restoring it won't work, that will just expand the ISO to the partition. There is a way (I will need to look this up) to install OS X within OS X to a different drive.

Or, you can create 2 partitions on the G5 drive. Restore the ISO to Partition 2, boot off of Partition 2, install Leopard onto Partition 1, and then delete Partition 2.

 

[Ka0t1x]

Will it boot from USB? (I can't remember if G5's can do this).. Do you have a FW external hard drive?

Image your Leopard disk to a flash drive/FW drive and install from there.

 

[leglez]

I tried to get it to boot from a usb dvd drive with no luck. I am sure he has an external hard drive, but wouldn't that be the same as booting it from an internal hard drive?

If I make 2 partitions, restore it to one partition how would I go about booting that partition?

 

[TheStu]

I tried to get it to boot from a usb dvd drive with no luck. I am sure he has an external hard drive, but wouldn't that be the same as booting it from an internal hard drive?

If I make 2 partitions, restore it to one partition how would I go about booting that partition?

Hold ALT at boot to bring up the boot menu.

Also, I think that kaotix is right, PPC couldn't boot off USB. Firewire was a go, but not USB.

 

[Emulex]

bust out the old ipod they still have a use. firewire bootage