Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Ih8reno

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Aug 10, 2012
1,383
206
Just bought a powermac g4 with the monitor and after turning it on I see 2 hard drives. One is osx and the other is...windows nt. I am not sure what to do, is there any way I can run this os at least to try it? The other hd is running tiger and cannot be upgraded to leopard as it is the 733mhz model.
 

bax2003

Cancelled
Dec 25, 2011
947
203
You cannot run ANY Windows on PowerPC Macs natively.
Only way to run Windows on PowerPC is with Virtual PC software. For that I do not recomment any G4 below 733 MHz and 1GB of RAM.

Somebody must have put that NT disk into G4 to do some backup or something like that, not to use NT OS on G4.

So you cannot boot that NT on G4.
 

jrsx

macrumors 65816
Nov 2, 2013
1,057
17
Tacoma, Washington
You can't execute binaries meant for i386 or other architectures on PPC. They have different instruction sets - it's impossible to run windows on a PPC machine without an emulator - you just can't.
 

Nermal

Moderator
Staff member
Dec 7, 2002
20,595
3,936
New Zealand
There was actually a PowerPC version of NT, from back in the days when it looked like PPC may have been more successful. However, I'm 99% confident that it's too old to be compatible with a G4.
 

647156

Cancelled
Dec 4, 2011
276
373
NT 3.51 and 4.0 were available for PPC but they won't run on any Apple hardware; they are only compatible with non-Apple PPC machines like those made by IBM.

Your G4/733 can easily be made to run Leopard by the way, details can be found in the forum.
 
Last edited:

robertdsc

macrumors regular
Jan 28, 2014
202
9
LeopardAssist is a good place to get Leopard hacked on older machines. I've used it with 2 800MHz iMac G4s and it works fine.

I'm curious. I have a spare SATA drive with Leopard on it that has been fully installed to my own specs. If I slap an IDE adapter to it and load that drive onto my IDE controller card installed in my G4 466 and use CarbonCopyCloner, would the 466 run without any issues?
 

eyoungren

macrumors Penryn
Aug 31, 2011
28,698
26,713
I'm curious. I have a spare SATA drive with Leopard on it that has been fully installed to my own specs. If I slap an IDE adapter to it and load that drive onto my IDE controller card installed in my G4 466 and use CarbonCopyCloner, would the 466 run without any issues?
It's been reported that the adapters are somewhat finicky. I think you might be better served to drop in a PCI SATA card. You can get a PC one and flash it for $10. The data and power cables are a negligable amount to get too.

I did that and saved myself $70 compared to the going price on the Sonnet cards.
 

robertdsc

macrumors regular
Jan 28, 2014
202
9
It's been reported that the adapters are somewhat finicky. I think you might be better served to drop in a PCI SATA card. You can get a PC one and flash it for $10. The data and power cables are a negligable amount to get too.

I did that and saved myself $70 compared to the going price on the Sonnet cards.

I'll have to try it tomorrow when I have time. The slot I have free on my IDE controller card currently hosts a 500GB SATA drive with adapter and it works without issue, though I admit I haven't really given it a workout.

As for flashing a PC card, I don't own a PC, so no dice there. I was encouraged to see that the Sonnet card is still available direct. The one Sonnet SATA card I have in my G5 works like a charm. With all I've spent on IDE drives, though, I'm not sure right now where I could put two more drives, lol.
 

AmestrisXServe

macrumors 6502
Feb 6, 2014
263
4
For the record, CHRP spec systems could run NT for PPC. I be;lieve that the only thing preventing a Mac from running it is the OS image in ROM, keeping in mind that NT/PPC was a product contemporary only to OWR Macs.

That drive may have been int he system to use in conjunction with Virtual PC, likely in an environment where NT was required for network/server needs, and was used on this Mac as a client system for remote management with NT-specific tools.

You can target a physical volume with VPC 6 and VPC 7, if you ever wish to use that installation. it is far more logical to replace that drive mechanism entirely, than to reformat a tiny, and old drive with a valid, hard to find OS on it.

The frightening part of this is that that drive could potentially have confidential datum on it, that should have been wiped. Most servers are wiped with at least a ten-pass erase, before released back into the market. This was clearly a system operated by a person who never learnt the definition of 'security risk'.
 

Ih8reno

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Aug 10, 2012
1,383
206
Update - wiped the drive as I would probably not use it. Stopped using pcs after buying my early 2011 MacBook Pro. Now I have a blank drive and not sure what I'll do with it.
 

AmestrisXServe

macrumors 6502
Feb 6, 2014
263
4
Move all your iTunes music to it.

If I may suggest, two things:

Wiping the drive may be fine, and dandy, but you need to repartition it as GUID, if you ever want to be able to boot from it, which is a wise precaution.

I also suggest a seven-pass zero-out, to clear all datum, and mark any bad sectors. (A zero-out can also revive some sectors marked as bad.)

After that, I suggest running disk verification, and then cloning your boot drive to it, so that if you boot drive ever develops a fault, that you may use it as a secondary.

You didn't specify the capacity, so asking for suggestions on what to do with it could prove meaningless. You could use it as a Netboot image device, a scratch volume for Adobe suite, a general datum volume, a save-point volume for torrent datum (never use your boot device for this), as a boot mirror, or countless other things. If the two volumes are identical in size, you can further make a RAID-1 set of them (this will wipe both).
 

ihuman:D

macrumors 6502a
Jul 11, 2012
925
1
Ireland
You should have tried to boot into it and look at the files before wiping it. I doubt someone got Windows NT running on a PowerPC Mac but it would be interesting just to see.

You can't execute binaries meant for i386 or other architectures on PPC. They have different instruction sets - it's impossible to run windows on a PPC machine without an emulator - you just can't.

Except that you can. Windows NT 3.1 and 4.0 were both released for PowerPC machines, they just can't work with Macs because of OpenFirmware, they need a different bootloader.
 

Ih8reno

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Aug 10, 2012
1,383
206
The drive was wiped so that's a no go for the windows. It's a 130gb drive, thing is I stream all my media so won't be an itunes backup.
 

Intell

macrumors P6
Jan 24, 2010
18,955
509
Inside
Wiping the drive may be fine, and dandy, but you need to repartition it as GUID, if you ever want to be able to boot from it, which is a wise precaution.

Why would Ih8reno partition a drive in a PowerMac as GUID if he wants to be able to boot from it? PowerPC Macs cannot boot from GUID drives, only Intell Macs can. Ih8reno would want to format it as APM which both PowerPC and 2009 and older Intell Macs can boot from.
 

Ih8reno

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Aug 10, 2012
1,383
206
just doubled the ram with a donation from a local computer shop. Running 768mb ram (3 256 chips) and found a way to use an acrylic apple cinema display screen I picked up with this mac. Problem with the screen was the back leg broke off, thanks to another used here I got the idea of using a guitar stand I got off kijiji for $10 to hold it up.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.