I wanted to install Leopard on an iMac G4 800 with a broken DVD player (having read errors on the Leopard DVD) and an empty internal drive. So I faced two issues that I have been able to solve: not having a bootable drive in the machine, and working around a broken DVD player. No bootable drive: To launch the installer, I booted from an external FireWire drive. This means that the installer will create a file named boot.txt for the Open Firmware on the drive the Mac was booted from. The issue is that the Open Firmware is instructed to read this file during the boot process, but it looks for it on the internal drive. So the first boot will fail, as it will not find the file boot.txt. Continue the boot by typing mac-boot while in Open Firmware as indicated by Open Firmware. Once booted, copy the file boot.txt from the root of the boot drive to the root of the internal drive: cp /boot.txt /Volumes/myVolume/boot.txt. Now relaunch the i...

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