I'm typing this on my 300 MHz/320 MB/20 GB PDQ PowerBook, runing Tiger
10.4.2. It's been a bit of a battle using XPostFacto 4.0b5 so I
thought I should describe what I did and what the problems are in case
they can be fixed in a later version.
The PDQ is essentially a slightly tweaked WallStreet and is a
fully-legacy machine. It has Old World ROMs and serial, SCSI and ADB
ports. No built in USB or FireWire here, and it was already
unsupported in Panther (which I've been running on it for over a
year).
The end result seems to be fine so far, with the sole exception that I
can't find any way to adjust the screen brightness. The dedicated
rocker switch doesn't work (it did in Panther, and the sound volume
and mute ones do even in Tiger) and there is no control for it in the
System Preferences Displays panel.
Also, I'm currently running on batteries but there is no indication of
how long I should expect before they are flat. The percentage of
charge left looks reasonable though. It may well be that zapping the
PRAM and/or reformatting my root partition caused this loss of
information and it will be OK after a cycle. I'll see.
I don't have any sort of DVD drive for it, and don't have Tiger CDs,
so I chose to install Tiger by cloning it from my dual G5 using Carbon
Copy Cloner. That was a bit of a challenge. The G5 has FireWire
while the PowerBook has SCSI. I have a FireWire PC Card for the
PowerBook but it can't boot from it and it doesn't do FireWire Target
mode (of course), which is how I installed Tiger onto an old iMac.
The current version of Carbon Copy Cloner does not work on Tiger
because (from the web site) "Apple updated the authentication sceme
[sic] of AppleScript Studio (yea!) and there's a little bit of work to
be done to get that part of CCC working again". However I found that
it works perfectly if you run it as root e.g. using sudo:
sudo /Volumes/Carbon\ Copy\ Cloner/Carbon\ Copy\ Cloner.app/
Contents/MacOS/Carbon\ Copy\ Cloner
The PDQ is one of the machines that must have the OSX root partition
lie entirely within the first eight gigabytes of a disk, so I have my
20 GB disk partitioned into a 7.0 GB partition (called "/") for OSX
and an 11.6 GB partition (called "BrucePB") for OS9 and data.
I find 7 GB is very tight for OSX with a lot of apps installed and I
was constantly running out of space once I got into swap a bit (more
below on how I alleviate that), so I have /Users symlinked to
/Volumes/BrucePB/Users. This also helps with installing new OS
versions as I can temporarily remove the symlink for extra safety. If
space gets tight again I'll move /Applications to the other partition
as well but I haven't needed to yet.
My plan for installing Tiger involved nuking everything on the root
partition except for 3rd party apps and then using CCC to clone a
working Tiger ove the top of those applications. Once it was going
with dummy users I'd reinstate the /Users symlink to my real data.
That means that for a time the PowerBook would not have a bootable OSX
on its internal disk (it would have OS9), but since CCC needs OSX I'd
need to have a bootable OSX on an external disk.
I was not able to get XPostFacto's "helper disk" technique to work
reliably enough to trust it to temporarily have my only bootable OS
for the PowerBook be on a FireWire drive hanging off a PC Card. After
cloning Tiger from the G5 (and testing that the G5 could boot from
it), the first time I tried it on the PowerBook it booted and worked
fine (though I needed the PatchedRagePro driver, just as I do for
Panther) but I was then totally unable to get it to boot again in
about twenty attempts. Sometimes it would hang with "still waiting
for root device", sometimes it would get to right before the desktop
pattern changes just before the login window comes up.
I decided to see if I could get Tiger booting from an external SCSI
disk. The problem being that the largest one I have is only 3 GB
while my cloned copy of Tiger on the FireWire drive was over 5 GB
although that did include things such as the developer tools. I
cloned everything of Tiger except /System and /Developer from the
FireWire drive to the SCSI drive and then went through and deleted
almost everything in /Applications and X11 and printer drivers and a
few other things and got enough space to clone the 1.5 GB of /System
over as well.
I was then able to boot the stripped down Tiger on the SCSI drive and
use it for a while (running applications from other disks) to make
sure it worked OK and would boot reliably before nuking Panther off
the internal disk.
Into the home straight now. Booted in Tiger from the external SCSI
drive, cloned Panther from the internal drive to a spare prtition on
the external firewire drive (just in case I decide to put it back
later), deleted everything but 3rd party applications from the 7 GB
partition of the internal drive, cloned the original (not stripped
down) Tiger onto that partition from the FireWire drive, rebooted onto
the new Tiger on the internal drive. Easy.
Except there is one more problem.
I seem to keep having problems booting from a partition the first time
after cloning to it. I keep getting hangs and have to play around to
make it work. But once it works once it's fine from then on. I
haven't convinced myself 100%, but I think there may be a pattern
involving the PatchedRagePro driver. It seems that perhaps I have to
boot from the partition one time with PatchedRagePro not selected and
just accept the video artifacts (16 bit mode has totally screwed up
colours -- see http://www.hoult.org/bruce/rainbow.jpg -- while 32 bit
mode has a purple cast in areas of the screen that have been redrawn),
and then enable PatchedRagePro for the next boot. But I didn't keep
good enough records of what I was trying to be sure of that. I also
have a feeling that it may help to run XPostFacto from OS9 when
switching from one copy of OSX to another. But, again, I'm not at all
sure of this.
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