I have an old Powerbook G4 15". I haven't used it in years and it's in pretty bad shape, but last time I tried it booted up at least. Now it won't even boot up and I want to access the hard drive. I do have some other Macs in the house, including a new tb MBP, a 2009 Macbook and a Mac mini. Is there some way I can hook up the hard drive to another computer to boot from it?
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How can I boot up a PPC hard drive with a dead battery?
- Thread starter dapork
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I believe you can remove the hard drive, place it in a USB enclosure, plug that into another PPC mac (is the Mini PPC ?) and in settings select that USB drive as the start drive and reboot - shoud boot from the Powermac drive but still give you access to the original drive to copy docs etc across - BUT just not sure if PPC macs support USB booting in this way - if it doesn't then I guess it won't give you the option in settings to select it as a boot drive...
P.S. - What am I saying - no need to boot from it if you just want to copy files across(!!) Just place the removed Powerbook drive in a USB enclosure (very cheap) and any Mac will see it as a normal USB drive and copy your files across. If the drive is PATA and not SATA you may have 'fun' finding a USB enclosure that supports that (I can't remember if PB's were SATA or PATA)
Notwithstanding a dead battery, your post makes no mention of an attempt to boot using the Powerbook's mains power adapter. Do you have one, and if so was there any signs of life? If not, (and apologies for stating the obvious) you may even have a defective power adapter.
Regarding SATA/PATA adapters to connect an HD externally and read or transfer the contents, I have many times successfully used the following model (or similar). I now find I couldn't be without it!
https://www.amazon.com/Drive-Adapte...+Optical+Drive+with+External+AC+Power+Adapter
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Well the area where the adaptor connects was banged at one point I think, so I was on my second power adaptor and if I remember correctly it didn't light anymore anyway. In any case yeah it could be the power adaptor. I went ahead and brought to a computer store and gave the guy an external hard drive and just told him to put the content onto it.
It doesn't need to be PowerPC if it is a more recent version of Tiger or Leopard, from what I remember. The versions of Tiger after the Intel release, and Leopard in general, are Universal and should boot on either architecture. But I could be remembering that wrong. Still, worth a shot at least.
It all depends on the importance of the information stored on the drive, if it's worth the effort...
First you'll have to recover that drive from your PowerBook, 'cause (if Power-Adapter is ok) your PB seems to be nearly beyond repair and you can't boot the PB into Target-Mode and recover data via FireWire...
The next steps depend on if you've used FileVault or if there's no encryption of your user-account.
If there's no encryption, you may get one of those hard-drive-connection-kits with an IDE-To-USB adapter, which @CooperBox already mentioned. Then you might read all data from your USB-connected hard drive with any PPC/intel-mac (maybe you'll have to trick around with user access rights, but it should work.)
If you've encrypted your user account with FileVault on that drive, then you'll need an external FireWire-Case for IDE-Drives (or even put that drive into another PowerBook, which is much more work to do) and you might boot another PPC-G4-machine from your FireWire-attached Powerbook-drive.
First you'll have to recover that drive from your PowerBook, 'cause (if Power-Adapter is ok) your PB seems to be nearly beyond repair and you can't boot the PB into Target-Mode and recover data via FireWire...
The next steps depend on if you've used FileVault or if there's no encryption of your user-account.
If there's no encryption, you may get one of those hard-drive-connection-kits with an IDE-To-USB adapter, which @CooperBox already mentioned. Then you might read all data from your USB-connected hard drive with any PPC/intel-mac (maybe you'll have to trick around with user access rights, but it should work.)
If you've encrypted your user account with FileVault on that drive, then you'll need an external FireWire-Case for IDE-Drives (or even put that drive into another PowerBook, which is much more work to do) and you might boot another PPC-G4-machine from your FireWire-attached Powerbook-drive.