G4 Needs IDE Drive to Boot?

[Retrosonic]

This is really wierd. If anyone can point me in the right direction I'd appreciate it.

I installed a firewire external 500 gig drive to my old G4.

I then used Superduper to clone the old 30 gig IDE boot drive to the new 500 gig drive.

I set the startup disk to boot from the new 500 gig drive, restarted, and Viola! She started up right from the 500 gig drive.

When I removed the old IDE drive and rebooted, she would not boot!!!
The machine seems to need the old IDE drive connected even tho its set to boot from the external drive.

What went wrong? How come it wont boot with just the External drive connected? Its an exact copy of the old IDe boot drive???

Anybody have any ideas?

thanks in advance for the help.

 

[Makosuke]

Out of curiosity, if you turn the computer on and hold down the option key when the internal drive isn't attached, do you get the startup volume select screen? If so, does the external show, and can you boot from it that way?

Although, depending on the age of the computer it's possible that feature doesn't exist; I forget when it was added, but pretty early in the G4 era, I think.

 

[msevild]

If Makosuke's response doesn't resolve the issue. Couple basic questions first. Was the new external drive set to Apple Partition Map? Secondly, when you chose to start up from that drive from the startup disk program, how did you verify you indeed started from the external? When the system cannot boot off of a drive you specify, it will fall back on the original or the next available boot source.

P.S. you can check if it is Apple Partition Map with Disk Utility. Also I do not know if Super Duper actually checks the partition scheme or if it just pretty much ditto's the information over and blesses the drive afterword(pretty much just paying for the nice GUI look).

 

[Retrosonic]

Check

Mseveild:

Well, I changed the startup disk to the external drive and booted up.

1) The external disk appeared in the upper right hand corner of the screen

2) When I go to "about this Mac" it says the startup disk is the external drive

3) On the external drive, there is an indicator light. As the G4 is booting up, the light is a flashing red/blue. After the G4 has booted it changes to a steady blue. So , it shows activity on boot up.


So based on those 3 things, I concluded that it did indeed boot off the external disk. Right or wrong?