So, during the day today, Ron took me to a local Best Buy to try to find an external CD-ROM drive. They had bunches. USB 2.0/1.1. No Firewire. My old laptop only has USB 1.1, which is dead slow. But it is what they had. I got one. Had a burner in it too. Cool enough.

Got it back to Rons place. Plugged it in. Put in the OS X Disk 1. It saw it! All the files looked like they were there. Did a disk check on it. It said it was fine! Woo! Hit the install thing, and it rebooted to start the install… and booted normally, not from the CD.

Repeated by choosing the bood drive from the Preference Pane. Same deal. After finding some hints online, repeated by booting with the option key and choosing the external CD. I hit Opt-V to get the verbose listing as it started to boot. It would start… then just keep waiting forever for data from the drive that wouldn’t come.

Read several places online that booting from a USB 1 mounted drive is like booting from floppies in the old days (takes forever) except the OS is now many hundreds of floppies in size. The drive whirred for a while, but then seemed to stop, no data transver lights flickering. The boot process just continued to report “waiting for device” every minute or so.

This was definately a no go.

Now, me by myself would have probably just thrown the drive in the basement and bought a firewire drive when I got the chance, but Ron’s wife Ursula offered to return it for me and so instead I got the full purchace price credited back to me. Thanks Ursula!

I did call the CompUSA in Pittsburgh (the closest big computer store to where Ron lives) to see if they had any firewire CD Drives in stock. They did not. So I just went to the Apple Store online and ordered one to be FedExed to me. Hopefully I’ll have it Monday morning. If not, definately Tuesday.

Now, of course I don’t know for sure if the scratched CD is useable. (Although Ron buffed out a lot of the damage with toothpaste, it is still quite visibly scratched.) When the drive arrives, I’ll find out. If it still doesn’t boot, even with a firewire drive at a decent speed, then I’ll ahve to get the disk replaces. I’ll probably start by asking Jon if I can borrow his. But eventually I will probably buy the one I had intended for my mom… or… Brandy says she will take it back to the store and see if they will replace it. Perhaps that would be more cost effective. :-)

Anyway, I’m quite annoyed at being several days delayed on trying Panther. Sigh. Oh well, guess I’ll have it up and running Monday or Tuesday probably.

Now if only Zeus can remain functional until next year too…

Oh. I also went to the gym with Ron today. Felt great. I really should do that more often. :-)