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[ceratophyllum]

I got this iBook on eBay for about $29 shipped. It came with Tiger. I decided to upgrade to Leopard because macports says it is still supported. So first, I burned the Leopard install DVD (the 4.7 GB version w/o optional installs) from Macintosh Garden. Holding down Alt or C did not get the iBook to boot from the disk. Starting the Leopard installer from OS X and clicking Restart didn't work either.

Booting to OpenFirmware, I tried all the usual commands to boot BootX or tbxi. Nothing worked.

So I dd'ed the original ~8GB Leopard iso to a USB stick and tried booting from that. No luck with Alt or C so I booted OpenFirmware...and found no disk@X entries anywhere under usb1, usb2, usb3 in the device tree.

Then I read about "the hub trick"  to get a USB drive to appear in the device tree. I guess had Apple read about it too, because this iBook will not boot even to openfirmware with a hub connected! (I seem to remember something about this back in '05: I thought my iBook had died when I plugged a hub into it, turned it on and it chimed and the screen stayed black!)

This iBook 12" has OF ver 4.9.  So I decided to put it in target disk mode and try installing from an iBook 14" with OF 4.8 using a firewire cable. Turns out the ibook 14" won't alt boot from CD or USB drive either.  I put the USB stick in the hub and connected it to the ibook 14" and tried to boot into openfirmware. This time it worked and it found the drive:

Code: [Select]

dev usb1
ls

said there was a disk there:
usb1/hub@1/disk@1

I booted the Leopard install disk with:

Code: [Select]

boot usb0/hub@1/disk@1:3,\\:tbxi

Strangely, a few seconds after booting, the backlight switched itself off on the ibook 14". Having come this far, I got out my flashlight and continued the install. It took about 2 hours to install Leopard onto the iBook 12".

What voodoo did Apple do to make their DVD/CD install media work? Why was Apple so keen on stopping people from booting 3rd party USB/CD? Hiding usb disks seems like deliberate obfuscation/malice toward the user. Were they afraid too many users would try Linux and discover how hopelessly bloated the big cats were?

btw, all my firewire optical drives died years ago and I don't plan to buy any more FW stuff now that it is transitioning from obsolete to vintage.