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Here's the deal. I recently came into possession of a PowerMac G5, which came running Panther (10.3.4). According to those that I got it from, It was originally running Leopard, but as the rest of the systems that were being used with it were running Panther, The computer was downgraded. Now, as I am wanting to reverse this so I can get better use out of this computer, I find myself quite... Stuck. I Have a .DMG of Leopard on an NTFS Hard-drive attached to my Windows 7 Workstation, but as the hard drive is NTFS, I cannot simply just plug it into my PowerMac and expect it to work (Doing this actually crashes the computer, but thats another thing). Apple won't let me update to 10.3.9 either, as Panther is no longer in support, so I really don't have any way of getting NTFS support to access this drive, as it currently stands (NTFS Read/Write support was introduced in 10.3.9).

I Have tried putting the .DMG on a flash drive as well, but it is just under 7 GB in size, and the only file system accessible by both Mac and Windows is FAT32, which has a 4GB File size cap, Meaning that I can't move the .DMG via flash drive. Normally I would format my flash drive to the exFAT file system, which could hold this file, but support for this file system was only added in the Intel versions of OS X.

I've Also attempted burning the .DMG from my windows computer, as I was advised by many, but after about 2 hours wasted in PowerISO and 3 now-broken DVD+R dual-layer Disks, I'm still nowhere.

Any suggestions to getting this PowerMac of mine upgraded? I'm rather reluctant to purchasing a disk copy of Leopard from Ebay or Amazon, due to the cost probably totaling around 100 dollars, which I do NOT have right now. Provided I had a method of getting the .DMG onto my Mac from my Windows Workstation, I could burn it to a disk using Disk Utility, but again, provided that there is a way to move the .DMG in the first place. Thanks in advance.

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  • That machine is at least a decade old. Are you setting it up for an exhibit at the Computer History Museum? By Moore's Law, that machine is probably 1/128th as powerful as a modern Mac Pro, and yet it takes the same amount of electricity to run. It's really not very green to run a machine that old, and in fact probably isn't worth the electricity cost. If you just wanted to experience a Mac for cheap, buy a used 2013 or 2012 Mac mini. Don't waste time on a machine that came out before most people had heard of Wikipedia.
    – Spiff
    Mar 2, 2014 at 7:48
  • I Was planning on using this system for recording audio, binning video footage, and other things that generally don't require much computing power. Say I'm rendering a project on my main editing workstation but I also need to capture some footage from another project. I've used the same model of computer with Leopard exactly for this purpose at work, and it works fine. Even If its processors are a bit antiquated, I was able to put 8 GB of RAM into it, so there's that. Mar 2, 2014 at 8:24
  • It's just that you're using approximately 128 times more electricity to do those things than you need to. Not to mention the resulting air conditioning use in the summer. By the way, if you have a Mac at work, why not use it to solve your problems rather than fighting with a Windows machine that doesn't understand .dmg files?
    – Spiff
    Mar 2, 2014 at 8:35
  • Electricity costs are not a problem, and my home office is naturally cooled so that I do not require air conditioning for cooling my computers. Secondly, I WOULD do that, but I'm not entirely sure the Firm I work for would appreciate it. I could try to see if I can do that, though. Thanks for the suggestion. Mar 2, 2014 at 8:40

2 Answers 2

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Try to burn the DMG you have from a Mac, not a PC. Or, you could buy the DVD, available at Amazon and probably elsewhere. Or, as a comment suggested, buy a used Mac mini, not just for the green & performance reasons given, but do it for the compatibility w/ modern OS X and x86-based apps.

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One possibility would be to split the disk image into two smaller (FAT32 compatible) files, move those to the Mac, rejoin them, and burn that. It looks like HJSplit would work for splitting on the windows side, and rejoining on the Mac side should just be a matter of using the Terminal command cat. If you had a FAT32 volume named "DOSVOL" containing the installer as "Leopard.dmg.001" and "Leopard.dmg.002", this should join them and put the result on your desktop:

cat /Volumes/DOSVOL/Leopard.dmg.* >~/Desktop/Leopard.dmg

BTW, a warning: OS X installers generally come in two flavors: generic (which'll work on any Mac that version of OS X supports), and model-specific (which will refuse to run on anything but the specific model they were built for, but include all the bundled software for that model). If the installer is 7GB, it's probably one that includes bundled software and won't work unless it's for the particular model of PowerMac G5 you have.

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