carnage

Installing Tiger if you don't have a DVD drive.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger now comes on a single DVD by default. While this is more convenient than the disc-swapping required by the 3 Panther CDs, it's tricky if you're trying to install Tiger onto an older machine that does not have a DVD drive.

I found an article by Jaharmi describing FireWire Target Mode (which I've also gone over) and a new technique involving using an external FireWire drive to create a dedicated partition that is a Tiger DVD disk image. Basically, you use Disk Utility to Restore the DVD to a spare partition you don't mind erasing. Handy if you have an extra FireWire drive lying around. I tried it this morning, and discovered a few things:

• The process requires you to erase a partition on your FireWire drive. This may require some thinking ahead.
• If you create a new partition, make sure you're generous in allocating space. Disk Utility will select the next lowest convenient number (based on the 1k = 1012 bytes formula, I expect) even if you try to get clever with your partitioning. The Tiger DVD takes up around 2.5 GB, so I tried to allocate just above that. The Restore process failed partway through, saying that there was some kind of file error. Giving the partition a full 4GB did the trick.
• If the Restore process does fail, both the source and destination volumes will remain unmounted. The visual indicator for this is pretty subtle (the volume names are greyed out in the list on the left, generally where you aren't looking) and you might be puzzled because further attempts to Restore will give you a "file not found" sort of error. The solution is to re-mount the target drive partition, and then use the File menu to eject the source DVD. Re-insert the DVD and it will mount.

The point of all this was to see if I could install Tiger onto my Wallstreet PowerBook via XPostFacto, which only has a CD drive. My quick experimentation with the new Tiger/FireWire partition described above resulted in a kernel panic. I'll have to look into this further, but for now I think the answer might be to send away for the Tiger CDs (see the "Media Exchange Program" box in the right column).

DIY: replacing batteries on the PowerBook G3.

I have 3 PowerBook G3 Series (Wallstreet) batteries floating around, and they all have less than 10 minutes' worth of charge in them. This is par for the course; if you leave your PowerBook (or any other laptop with LiOn batteries) plugged in most of the time and the batteries don't get a chance to run down all the way, they're not going to hold a charge after a while. It's good to "exercise" them once in a while.

I did some digging and found this article on how to replace the cells inside your PowerBook G3 battery, and some photos of the battery disassembly process. Turns out each large battery has 9 smaller AA-sized LiOn cells in it, and if you're handy with a soldering iron, you can replace them yourself. The risks are high, though: LiOn batteries will explode if they're not wired up just right. This project is beyond my skill level, especially since it looks like the finished product won't give you anything near the battery life of a factory replacement.

But the plastics on these things are so sturdy. I wonder if I could crack them open and make them into 2.5" FireWire/USB drive cases...