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I recently acquired a G4 ibook from ebay. it came with no books, no disks and no information. of course the seller was not the original owner. I need to be able to see what operating system I have. not sure if it is tiger or leopard. The only thing I can come up with 10.4.11. I also do not have the original master password and would love to be able to reset it, but do not know how. Have been considering wiping the hard drive and re-installing OS. Any advice from anyone would be so helpful. I am new to the world of mac. Am really excited about getting started, but being new, I am sure I am going to have a lot of questions.
 

BrianLachoreVPI


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OS X 10.4 is Tiger. I think you'd definitely be better off doing a clean install but someone else will have to chime in with what OS that pc will support.
 

RavingMac

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I recently acquired a G4 ibook from ebay. it came with no books, no disks and no information. of course the seller was not the original owner. I need to be able to see what operating system I have. not sure if it is tiger or leopard. The only thing I can come up with 10.4.11. I also do not have the original master password and would love to be able to reset it, but do not know how. Have been considering wiping the hard drive and re-installing OS. Any advice from anyone would be so helpful. I am new to the world of mac. Am really excited about getting started, but being new, I am sure I am going to have a lot of questions.

You will need a set of OS disks to do the reset and reinstall. All but the earliest iBook G4s were capable of Leopard 10.5. The first iteration with the 800MHz CPU were limited to OS 10.4.11 (Tiger).

OS disks are available on eBay, though expensive. Expect to pay $80 to $100 USD. And, this is critical:

MAKE SURE YOU PURCHASE RETAIL OS DISKS, NOT OEM!

Excuse the shout, but sometimes this point is hard to get accross. Retail disks are Black, OEM disks are Gray or Silver and are machine specific, thus will not work with your iBook.
Finding an OEM disk for your machine at this point is about like winning the lottery, not impossible, but don't hold your breath.
 
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I need to add that it is a 133ghz processor with 768mb memory. and a 55gig hard drive.
 

RavingMac

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I need to add that it is a 133ghz processor with 768mb memory. and a 55gig hard drive.

1.33 GHz instead of 133 GHz?

Anyway, see my previous post. You should be able to run Leopard or Tiger.

EDIT: depending on which Model No iBook you have, it originally shipped with either 10.3 (Panther) or 10.4 (Tiger). If it is the latter, your odds of finding the exact OEM disks are a little better, but you are still better off getting the retail disks as they will install on any machine capable of supporting the OS (with the caveat that you can't run old OS on a newer Mac because it will lack drivers needed to support new hardware).
 

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I need to add that it is a 133ghz processor with 768mb memory. and a 55gig hard drive.
I assume that's 1.33ghz, not 133ghz. Otherwise, you've got yourself quite the supercomputer there. :p

Here are the system requirements for Leopard (10.5). You can put Leopard on it but you'll want to put more RAM in the machine (yes, you meet the minimum but barely).

As BrianLachoreVPI mentioned, you'll probably want to wipe the machine and as Razormac noted, you'll need the black retail disc which will be hard to find.
 

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