Installing Panther over Tiger

I’m blogging this because I’ll never remember it otherwise. Here’s what I had to do to put Panther (OS X 10.3) back onto a disk that had been upgraded to Tiger (OS X 10.4). I did this to set up a coding environment to regress OS-specific problems; I don’t recommend this otherwise.

This was done on a system with two internal HDs, so I could be booted into 10.4 on the main HD while screwing around with the second HD. First I wiped out Tiger as best as I could using sudo rm -r in the terminal. I deleted everything that looked Unixy or OS-ish, including the root level dirs /System /var /tmp /etc /private /bin /sbin /usr and anything else that tempted me. Warning: this is a good way to instantly totally destroy an OS installation.

The trickiest part turned out to be that for some reason my old 10.3 install disk that shipped with the G5 doesn’t appear “blessed” under 10.4. Blessing is basically a note on the disk as to where the boot information lives for Macs. The best way to determine what’s going on is with the aptly named “bless” command utility; the man page explains what it does. bless –info will show you if a volume is not bootable; if it’s not then booting with the “c” key (or any other of the 10 ways to boot from CD-ROM will fail).

So now we come to OpenFirmware. Open Firmware is, well, I don’t know exactly what it is, but for our purposes it’s a command shell before anything is booted where we can monkey around. Before booting into Open Firmware, one thing to check: use pdisk (L command) to list the partitions of all drives - we’ll need to know the partition number of our CD-ROM’s main partition. Strangely it appears that all Mac partitions are really two partitions - a small header and then a real partition. So the CD-ROM partition number is “2″, which we’ll need later but not be able to find from OpenFirmware.

To boot into OpenFirmware, hold down the command, option, ‘o’ and ‘f’ keys all at once on boot. You should see some kind of command prompt. The money command is:

boot cd,2:\System\Library\CoreServices\BootX

This basically means boot from partition 2 from the device aliased to “cd” using BootX (that’s a unix file path but with weird slashes). BootX basically always lives on that path on modern OS X installations. BTW if that file doesn’t exist on your CD-ROM, it may not be bootable.

Other useful commands:

devalias - lists all the aliases to devices. Finding devices in the tree is harder if there aren’t aliases, but my G5 seems to have a bunch of nice ones.
dev [device] - change tree devices, similar to ls.
pwd - print current devices
ls - list devices within the current devices.
dir - list files. Syntax is something like dir cd:2,\ to list the root dir of the second partition on the device aliased to CD.