There are many things that can go awry in an OS X install even under normal circumstances, so it may not be the unconventional install route that’s the issue. I’m paraphrasing, because after I read the email preview, I somehow managed to delete the message, so I can’t reply directly (and I hope the correspondent will read this article).

However, this morning I received a note from a reader who said that after attempting an install of Tiger in this manner, his computer refuses to boot and presents a gray screen. And several readers wrote to say that the method had worked for them as well. The iBook is currently running OS X 10.4.6 happily. This method worked flawlessly for me, and there have been no subsequent issues over the ensuing 16 months or so. In July, I posted a column, Installing OS X 10.4 Tiger on DVD-Challenged Macs Using FireWire Target Disk Mode, describing how I had installed OS X 10.4 Tiger on my CD-ROM equipped iBook G3 by mounting it as an external hard drive from my DVD drive-equipped Pismo PowerBook via FireWire Target Disk Mode and choosing the iBook’s hard drive as the destination disk in the installer.

Apple dvd player gray screen