Innocence lost

With a slightly heavy heart I’ve had to install parental controls on the computer in the back room – which meant upgrading the G3 Tower of Power from MacOS 10.3 to 10.4 (Tiger).

The boys had been looking at some very mildly risque videos on a web site they’d got off some friends – eldest is only 7. The computer is in a shared room, but not a room where they’re very noticable, which is probably a bad thing but there’s nowhere else to put it, and I don’t like their sticky fingers on my PowerBook very much. Makes me nervous.

So, another little bit of innocence lost.

But the nerd in me was quite pleased to have figured this out: I had MacOS 10.3 installed on a 20GB drive that had been partitioned in two. I only have an upgrade installer for 10.4 that requires 10.3 to be installed before it’ll run. But once it’s found a 10.3 installation, you can use Disc Utility on the 10.4 updated DVD to repartition / reformat the disc that 10.3 is itself on. So all the files you need for OS 10.4 must be on the updater DVD. And I only had to spend an hour or two shovelling a spare DVD drive into it and updating the OS, and recreating everyone’s accounts and finding  wallpaper of James Bond and Thierry Henry and worrying about data I might have inadvertantly wiped…