G4 iMac OS installer doesn't work - is it the right version?
I have a G4 iMac, 6,1 1GHz G4, 768 MB RAM, 80GB HD, 17" display.
The internal optical drive no longer works.
I can use a USB external optical drive to boot from a MacOS X 10.4 installer and install that version of the OS.
I have a set of installer discs which I think are the installer discs I got with this iMac (bought second hand) - it certainly had some version of 10.2 installed on it back then. The OS installer DVD is marked:
iMac Software Install and Restore
MacOS 10.2.3 DVD version 1
Z691-4200-A
If I boot with this DVD in a USB external optical drive, I can select it as a boot disc, but the boot process fails with a "Can't use this OS circle with a diagonal line symbol" https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210901.
I would like to find out if this MacOS X 10.2.3 installer disc SHOULD be able to boot this Mac, but I cannot find a reference on-line to help.
I would appreciate any suggestions on how I might find out.
Solution 1:
The original OS installer CDs that came with Macs were specific to each model of Mac, so you have to be very careful about pairing them up.
However, the only iMac that came with 10.2.3 is the Early 2003 17" 1Ghz G4 model (and the 15"), so it should be the right disk, as far as I can tell. I can't find any online confirmation of that, though.
There are other 6,1 models that came with 10.2.7, but they have a 1.25 GHz processor.
The USB ports on that Mac are v1.1 (12 Megabits/s!), so they would be painfully slow, even if you did get it working. I don't know if that might even contribute to the error.
I had one of these models recently - and I replaced the internal drive with a new 2.5" laptop drive, using an IDE to SATA adaptor. It ran well on OS X Tiger 10.4. Leopard was a bit slow, and with Tiger I could still use Classic.
So, if you want to get this up and running, my advice would be to find a 'generic' Tiger installer DVD. (There are even disk images available to download.)
(I've since turned the iMac into a lectern....)