Well it is 3:42 AM and I have a meeting to be at for 7:00 AM – after a two hour drive of course. My TIBook dies tonight and my Leopard install disc is four hours away on loan to a friend… ughh,

Luckily I am on beer 7, I am not driving and I have BB King sym-linked on my remote HTTP Box. I am also lucky that the guy I am staying with has a brand new Macbook Pro that has no issue sending my dinosaur Powerbook (via firewire) an install image.

Here was my plan and how it really turned out.

The old Superdrives WILL not read a +R dual layer disc, and obviously that is what I bough in desperation. I needed a quick way to get my Mac back in action without going grey or finding a computer store open at 4AM. I ended up recalling a quick chat I had with a “fanboy” regarding Apple hardware’s ability to boot in “Target Disc Mode” which ended up saving my ass for this meeting.

I stole the image from usenet at 1.3 MB / s (I did in fact purchase a legitimate family license) and had it within two hours. HellaNZB took care of the parring / unrarring and I was able to transfer the DMG to my buddies Macbook Pro in a matter of minutes using his external hard drive.

I then burned the DMG onto one of the Dual Layer discs I had earlier purchased and rebooted the Macbook Pro into Target disc mode by holding the letter “t” on boot whilst the newly burnt disc was in the drive.

I rebooted my Powerbook holding the option key and was immediately able to select the Leopard Install DVD media shared over firewire – whew.

Almost four hours in we are looking at a brand new Leopard 10.5.1 install, almost a full pack of cigarettes and a “retartedly” incapacitated man who has a meeting in just a few hours… wish me luck.