I have panther currently installed on my emac. I want to know two things. First, can I use a tiger for emac OEM disc to upgrade? Second, can I do an archive and install? I WILL be backing up the entire harddrive to external, but I was curious.
thanks in advance.
Are you talking about a grey 10.4 disk for an eMac when you say OEM? It may work, though I've not tried it.
However, don't risk losing your 10.3.9 if it fails to Archive and Install. Make a clone of your eMac's disk onto an external disk before you try this, as a copy, and also as an escape restoration path to get back to square one if using the grey disk doesn't work out.
yes,precisely. I originally used a grey OEM disc to install panther on it, but I recently came across a grey OEM disc for tiger that is also meant for an emac. My emac DOES meet the requirements for tiger. I'm just wondering if I can upgrade and save the trouble of having to format and risk losing panther like you said. How do I achieve this "escape restoration path"?
You won't need to reformat as it will be the same file structure for both. HFS+ Extended.
The escape path, requires a bit of hardware (an external hard drive) and some free software SuperDuper!
You make a copy of the internal disk to the external disk which will then be a fully bootable clone.
Apart from being a excellent method of keeping a current backup, if for example something went wrong on the internal drive, you can boot into the ext. and 'clone' it, i.e. the external, back to the internal. That will take you back to the state it was before it was changed or damaged.
The Mac OS also has this ability to make a backup using the Restore function in Disk Utility but I've used SuperDuper for many years and like it because it creates a bootable clone.
I wouldn't risk overwriting your 10.3.9 data with that upgrade disk without having a copy of that data somewhere.
thank you. yes! I was actually going to be using carbon copy cloner. I'll look into superduper.
so you think I can upgrade using the OEM disc?
Gray OEM eMac OS discs are known to work across all eMac models as well as many other G4 Mac models.
If the 10.4 Tiger discs say eMac on them, there is a high probability that the OS will install without issues.
You do not mention the specs of your eMac ( CPU speed, how much RAM memory).
You may want to increase the amount of RAM in your eMac if it only meets minimum requirements.
Early eMacs could only take up to 1 GB of RAM.
Later eMacs could take up to 2 GB.
OS X likes memory RAM, so the more you have, the better OS X runs.
Depending on what version of OS X Tiger installs on your eMac, the last version of Tiger is OS X 10.4.11.
There is a combo updater package that you can download and install to bring your eMac to the last version of OS X Tiger.
If your eMac is either of the 1.25 or 1.42 GHz variety, you could opt to purchase and install OS X 10.5 Leopard.
This is the very last OS X version for older PPC Macs.
OS X Tiger is 6 years old. OS X Leopard is only about 3 years old.
This would allow you to be able to use any of Apple's latest and greatest iOS mobile devices at some point if you choose to do so.
Without knowing your eMac's specs, it's hard to advise.
Carbon Copy Cloner is good too. I mention Superduper simply because that is the one I use.
Whichever you use, with a clone of 10.3.9 on an external you will be able to choose which OS to boot up to, Tiger (if your disk works) or Panther.
You sound like you are on the right track.
"My emac DOES meet the requirements for tiger." further research would tell you that I have 1G of Ram and at least a G3 processor. Just for clarification though, I have a G4. 🙂 I was considering this, but I just so happen to possess an OEM disc for tiger. I think I'm just going to back up using CCC and then do a clean install using my OEM disc. thank you.
uprading emac OS using OEM discs.
