Please Help! (startup gets question mark)

[Mike Cali]

Hello, im new to this forum. I signed up basically to as a last resort to fix the problem im having.

Ok, first off, this is an g4 running on os9, really old. i'm getting the classic question mark when i try to start up. So i used to take it to the mac store and they would fix it easily by replacing the system file -- well im pretty much on the way to doing that. im booting up throw a friends mac using os x by starting my mac as a hard drive then booting my friends computer up -- works fine but then it says "this drive doesnt have any files os x can read"

excuse my ignorance. ive been away from my beloved macs for so many years. using a hand-me-down PC at the moment.
anything i can do from here? all im tryna do is retrieve the data from the old g4 onto a flash drive and get rid of it.

 

[Mike Cali]

BTW, cd drive is broken so i can boot off of that.

 

[Mike Cali]

wow...i find this hard to believe.

 

[mperkins37]

could try & install system software on an external firewire drive, Then boot from the external by holding down Option on startup. All you are running is Classic? Why?

 

[Mike Cali]

i dont exactly understand

just to clear things up

im using a g4 with os 9 and a broken cd drive.
trying to rebooth with a mac mini on osx -- and the osx wont read the os9 drive

 

[velocityg4]

Does your G4 have more than one hard drive? As I recall Target Disc Mode would never work on my G4 because of that.

There are a couple of other possibilities; since you said your G4 has been unused for years perhaps the hard drive has failed or the IDE port for the HD has failed. You could try connecting to your secondary IDE cable used by the CD drive, remember to set your jumpers on the HD and CD.

 

[mperkins37]

Take your friends mac, Hook up an external Firewire drive & install os 9 or osX,
Plug the external drive into your G4, Start up holding down option & choose the external drive.