Leopard Experience 2--Older Mac Installations, 450MHz and 1.4GHz PowerMac G4 Cube

We have two PowerMac G4 Cubes that we still use from time to time. One is a completely stock 450GHz PowerMac G4 Cube and the other is an upgraded 1.4GHz PowerMac G4 Cube with an Nvidia GeForce2 MX graphics card. We have used the stock Cube as our office server running Mac OS X Server 10.4.10.

We could not get Leopard to install from the installation DVD on either Cube. The installer stopped right away on the stock Cube displaying the message that Leopard can not be installed on this Mac. The installer got a bit farther on the upgraded Cube but quit early in the process stating that it could not validate the contents of the 'BaseSystem' package.

So, we formatted an 80GB external FireWire drive with the Apple Partition Map scheme, creating 10GB and 64GB partitions. Then we installed Leopard on the smaller 10GB partition using our 12" PowerBook G4 and updated it with Software Update. Finally, we booted the Cubes from the external FireWire drive and used Carbon Copy Cloner v3.0.1 to clone the Leopard installation from the external FireWire drive to the internal drives of the two Cubes. The stock Cube has only a 20GB drive, the reason for creating the small partition on the external FireWire drive. The upgraded Cube has an 80GB drive.

Both Cubes are now running off Leopard on their internal hard disk drives and they are running well, even the 450MHz Cube. It is obvious that the installer has been specifically designed to prevent the installation on Macs with CPUs slower than 867MHz even when they have been upgraded with a faster CPU, better graphics card, larger/faster hard drive and 1Gb of memory.

An alternative and shorter procedure would have been to boot both Cubes into target FireWire mode and then clone the drive of our PowerBook G4 onto each. However, we did not want everything already on our PowerBook G4 to be transferred to each Cube. [Bill Fox]