Ok i just purchased off of ebay a barebones imac it is a imac 15inch lcd g4 800 mhz processor no memory no hard drive no cd drive this is the older imac with the metal swing arm you see on you tube at this address http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA76B5xSPtI now here is where i need a opinon i purchase a lot of hard drives and memory and other computer stuff from diffrent stores my plan for this machine is i would like to rebuild this machine for open source mac games like battle for wesnoth so i do not have all of these games slowing down on my intel mac mini or speeding up eaither so my plan was to leave out the internal cd drive place two hard drives in the unit 1. 120 gig seagate hard drive (primary) 2. 500 gig seagate hard drive (secondary for games) now my question is this and i would like a honest opinon do you think this would be a good idea and does mac os x panther installation boot from a external cd drive the reason i ask is because i do not want to leave a crappy expensive apple cd drive in the unit when im not going to use it because almost all of these open source games do not require a toast images or a dmg to be burned what do you think???
You can always boot from an external FireWire hard drive if you use Carbon Copy Cloner to image the Panther CDs onto one. Or I believe you could set your iMac in FireWire target disk mode and copy over anything you need.