Account privs & SD!; crash recovery with .DMGs?

[DrDan in MA]

Well here I am with my HD on the Ti-PBG4 having become unbootable. Gotta replace that freakin HD ASAP I guess because this is the second time in a month that's happened.

Fortunately (thanks to you guys) I have an ext LaCie HD with two partitions, one of which has a SuperDuper backup (not a sparse image, but a full copy because it was directly connected via FW) of that disk as of Mon 13 Feb at 0300, which will be fine -- I believe it was done prior to any difficulties on the Ti-Mac's HD. That Mac runs 10.3.9 so the duplicated contents will boot as Panther when it is eventually restored.

Going over the restore drill prior to my SECOND question...

So what I do next is to stick a bootable CD into that sick Mac's drive, boot again while holding down the C key so that it reads the drive first, and bring up the OS therefrom. Since the ext HD is already connected to that machine, its Finder will "see" the two ext partitions (there's another with a "sparse image" of the Mac Mini that I'm writing this on).

All's I've got to do next is to

* view three logical disks available on the desktop of the Ti-Mac as booted from the CD. One will be the internal one (that's become unbootable, but which I hope will still be visible on the desktop -- if I can't see it, I'll just have to get that new HD ASAP), and another two partitions of the Ext LaCie HD.

* Start up the copy of SD! that's on the ext partition having the backup corresponding to the Ti-PbG4's HD,

* Tell it to copy the disk image it's running on BACK ONTO the internal HD of the Ti-Mac itself (which will effectively wipe that HD clean before writing the contents of the full SD backup onto that internal HD)

* Allow SD! to make the copied image bootable (thus hopefully restoring bootability to the Ti-Mac) and then

* Remove the CD from the Ti-Mac and allow it to boot normally from its internal HD.

Question ONE: Do I have this scenario right? Corrections welcome.

Question TWO: I'm having trouble locating the Panther CDs that came with the Ti-Mac. I have the set that came with the Mac Mini, which are Tiger. So I may not be able to use a 10.3.* CD to boot from, which is the OS level that's on the disk image that corresponds to the Ti-Mac's last OS level. Can I boot with the Mac Mini's bootable TIGER CD, use it to discover the ext HD partitions, and run SD as described above, thus recreating a bootable PANTHER OS and disk contents? Or must I only boot-from-CD using a PANTHER-specific CD?

TIA for any corrections and advice, as usual...