Mac Mini G4 Boot Problem

[macuser154]

I have a Mac Mini G4. It will no longer boot off it's internal drive. I would like to boot it off an external USB drive.

Whenever I hold "Option" while it boots, instead of taking me to a boot loader it takes me to the Open Firmware thing.

How do I tell it to boot off the external drive? The external drive is formatted with the Apple Boot Partition (for PPC) so I think that is fine.

 

[emoore]

I didn't think you could boot off a usb drive. I thought it had to be firewire. I boot my G4 mini off a firewire drive and it works fine.

 

[txnoob]

Yeah, I think it needs to be firewire. At least that's what I've been told

 

[OrangeSVTguy]

PPC Macs won't boot from a USB device(I did hear about one exception though where someone was able to boot from a USB thumbdrive on their G3).

Do you have a Firewire hard drive that you can boot from? Otherwise you're going to have to remove the old dead drive and replace it with a newer one. There's a 320gb 5400RPM drive that will work in the G4s. It has to be a PATA drive as the newer SATA drives won't work in the G4 Minis.

Have you tried to boot from your CD to see if your drive really is dead?

 

[ADent]

All G4 Macs and later are USB bootable - though 10.4.3 is the first version of Mac OS X that is USB bootable.

See the following for how to boot USB drives from open firmware: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060301112336384

A couple of comments seem to indicate that while G4 Macs are generally USB bootable (ironically the USB 1 machines may be the easiest to boot), it looks like a problems for G5 towers, but not G5 iMacs. YMMV.