Upgrading to Leopard, ancient hardware edition
It's Monday, and we have three and a half upgrades done. The three upgrades completed in as many hours were:
So what's the half upgrade? My dual 800MHz G4 PowerMac. It's not a supported machine, so the installer prevents me from installing Leopard on it. No problem, I said; I'll just put the PowerMac in target disk mode and use my laptop to install. Sadly, that strategy failed because I upgraded the PowerMac with a PCI Serial ATA controller for dual 300 GByte disks a while back, because the built-in ATA bus doesn't support drives bigger than 120 GBytes. But target disk mode only works with the built-in ATA bus. Oops.
So I've now put my laptop installation into target disk mode and have cloned that image onto my Quicksilver G4. But of course, I don't have all the same files on my laptop and my desktop with much larger disks. So now I have to copy over all the files that I don't carry around with me all the time, like my iTunes and iPhoto libraries and my 20+ years of financial records. It's not a major hardship; it's all just tedious.
Two issues have been slowing this process over the weekend: 1) my Quicksilver has also been upgraded with a USB 2.0 PCI card that seems to annoy the above-mentioned SATA controller and causes occasional kernel panics, and 2) I have caught a cold over the weekend, which is annoying me (and also causing personal crashes. ;-)). Interestingly, the kernel panics are much less frequent on Leopard than on Tiger, which encourages me to get the system upgraded. And, with over a million files on my hard disk to move over, the disk system is getting lots of stress testing. Since I have to configure the system all manually anyway, I'm converting the machine into a dual-booting Tiger/Leopard machine, just so I can run some of my historical games and software. And assuming all goes well, the upgrade should be done in the next day or two.
The process has been harder than I would have liked, but as a stockholder, I can't expect Apple to test and support its latest and greatest OS on six-year-old hardware that isn't even of the current processor architecture. But being a life-long thifty Yankee (meaning a person who lives in the northern US, not a baseball term), I see no reason to let perfectly good hardware go to waste. And if nothing else, I get a little more value out of 35-year-old computer science degree to boot.
UPDATE: I am now updating this post from my dual 800 MHz Quicksilver machine running Leopard (and Tiger if need be -- I set it up to dual-boot). And now that it has finished its Spotlight indexing, it's purring like a kitten and quite responsive. Details tomorrow.
- My 1GHz G4 Powerbook
- Son David's 2GHz Core Duo Black Macbook
- Son Robert's 2GHz Core Duo Macbook Pro
So what's the half upgrade? My dual 800MHz G4 PowerMac. It's not a supported machine, so the installer prevents me from installing Leopard on it. No problem, I said; I'll just put the PowerMac in target disk mode and use my laptop to install. Sadly, that strategy failed because I upgraded the PowerMac with a PCI Serial ATA controller for dual 300 GByte disks a while back, because the built-in ATA bus doesn't support drives bigger than 120 GBytes. But target disk mode only works with the built-in ATA bus. Oops.
So I've now put my laptop installation into target disk mode and have cloned that image onto my Quicksilver G4. But of course, I don't have all the same files on my laptop and my desktop with much larger disks. So now I have to copy over all the files that I don't carry around with me all the time, like my iTunes and iPhoto libraries and my 20+ years of financial records. It's not a major hardship; it's all just tedious.
Two issues have been slowing this process over the weekend: 1) my Quicksilver has also been upgraded with a USB 2.0 PCI card that seems to annoy the above-mentioned SATA controller and causes occasional kernel panics, and 2) I have caught a cold over the weekend, which is annoying me (and also causing personal crashes. ;-)). Interestingly, the kernel panics are much less frequent on Leopard than on Tiger, which encourages me to get the system upgraded. And, with over a million files on my hard disk to move over, the disk system is getting lots of stress testing. Since I have to configure the system all manually anyway, I'm converting the machine into a dual-booting Tiger/Leopard machine, just so I can run some of my historical games and software. And assuming all goes well, the upgrade should be done in the next day or two.
The process has been harder than I would have liked, but as a stockholder, I can't expect Apple to test and support its latest and greatest OS on six-year-old hardware that isn't even of the current processor architecture. But being a life-long thifty Yankee (meaning a person who lives in the northern US, not a baseball term), I see no reason to let perfectly good hardware go to waste. And if nothing else, I get a little more value out of 35-year-old computer science degree to boot.
UPDATE: I am now updating this post from my dual 800 MHz Quicksilver machine running Leopard (and Tiger if need be -- I set it up to dual-boot). And now that it has finished its Spotlight indexing, it's purring like a kitten and quite responsive. Details tomorrow.
Technorati Tags: Apple, Leopard, Quicksilver, Upgrades
posted by Carl Howe at
8:32 AM
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