PowerPC :: Installing OS X On Dual USB IBook With Broken Combo Drive

I had the brilliant idea of trying a clean install of OS X on my circa 2002 iBook. I had Tiger on there, but the iBook was quite sluggish and I was getting frustrated with the performance of the iBook on the only thing that I wanted it to use it for: the internet. So I thought that if I wiped the hard drive and installed OS X again, I could benefit from erasing an accumulation of junk on the iBook. (One thing to note is that the hard drive is actually from a clamshell iBook. The hard drive stopped working a few years ago, and I spent a weekend replacing the drive)

The combo drive has long since stopped working on the iBook, so I hooked up the iBook to my MacBook via firewire and erased the hard drive. But like an idiot I installed 10.5 instead of 10.4 and now the iBook only returns the folder with the question mark. I have not had any luck (either before the ill advised OS X install or before) with doing a remote install. I have the original disks that came with the iBook (10.1), but when I try to install them using the MacBook's drive it just tells me that I can't install it on my MacBook, which is not what I want to do.