Today, my sister, Allison, and I went to the Apple store at Satan Coast Plaza where she purchased a new 15" MacBook.

We decided that her old (2001) iBook should be given to Christine, but before it could be it needed to have an OS upgrade as it was still running 9.2. The Apple Store assistant manager, Maki Al-Nooh, told me how to upgrade a non-DVD drive old iBook to Mac OS X Tiger.

This is not for the weak of heart, nor folks who scare easily or lack patience. My PowerBook, the Silver Princess, had to become the Master machine to the old iBook. Using a Target (press "T" on start up of the iBook or slave machine) with a firewire connection, I was able to allow the two partitioned drives (Charlemange & Sparta) of the iBook to appear on the desktop of my PowerBook. Insert the OS X disk, reboot, tell it to install on the drive partition of the iBook with the most space (unfortunately, it did not give me the option to wipe the drives), and then let it do its install thing for an hour or so.

Now comes the hard part... It is finished, it reboots, but my desktop is not mine but the new desktop. Don't panic. Take a deep breath. Put the iBook's drives into the trash/eject. Disconnect the firewire. Reboot both.

Don't PANIC. iBook boots to OS 9.2. Silver Princess the PowerBook boots as the new OS X Tiger. Take deep breath.

Tell OS 9.2 to start up as the New OS X Tiger on the Sparta partition. Reboot. All is well, starts up as new OS X. Use the disk erase to take out all the old files and OS 9.2 to give more room to the old school puny 10 gb drive. Happy, all is well with the iBook. Now need to find a USB wifi dongle or an original Airport internal card for it.

Contine to tell oneself not to PANIC about the fact that the PowerBook is still booted as the new drive and not a lick of my stuff is on it's drive. Reboot with no firewire or connection. Pull out battery for further measure. Breath deep. Reboot machine. Ms. Jen's Silver Princess is back with all of its files and programs.

All is well.