Power mac g5-how do i boot from a usb hard drive?

[Jbergob]

i purchased a power mac G5 recently which broke after 2 days- it was bought from ebay. i sent it back to the seller who "repaired" it. It arrived today in the post and didnt work i oppend it up to see the hard drive had crack during transport, and the conector pins where bent and unconectable.

I made a clone copy of my macbook that should be bootable using something called carbon copy cloner, i now want to boot my power mac g5 from the external usb hard drive. This just apears on the screen with a folder and a question mark flashing. What can i do or is this possible.

help would really be appreaciated

 

[Intell]

You can't clone an Intell based Mac on to a drive and have it boot a PPC machine, without making sure the source drive is of the correct partition type. And only Leopard/10.5 is bootable on both Intell and PPC machines using the same drive.

 

[r.j.s]

^^^ Correct, but I thought PPC couldn't boot from USB ...

 

[Intell]

^^^ Correct, but I thought PPC couldn't boot from USB ...

All USB equipped Macs can. Most you must select the USB disk from the Startup pref pane. Some later G5's can startup via an OpenFirmware hack. I don't think any PPC Mac is capable simply by holding down Option at boot.

 

[Jbergob]

Well thank you for the reply's I will have to get a new hard drive on the insurance that the package had,

thank you anyway

 

[stroked]

All USB equipped Macs can. Most you must select the USB disk from the Startup pref pane. Some later G5's can startup via an OpenFirmware hack. I don't think any PPC Mac is capable simply by holding down Option at boot.

This is wrong. Only intel Macs can boot with usb. You can boot with firewire.

 

[Intell]

This is wrong. Only intel Macs can boot with usb. You can boot with firewire.

You are wrong, I have personally start a G3 iMac, G4 Cube, G4 iMac, Quicksilver PowerMac G4, Powerbook G4, and a PowerMac G5 all from USB. The Macs with USB 1.1 where a bit slow, but the ones with USB 2 booted just fine.

 

[stroked]

You are wrong, I have personally start a G3 iMac, G4 Cube, G4 iMac, Quicksilver PowerMac G4, Powerbook G4, and a PowerMac G5 all from USB. The Macs with USB 1.1 where a bit slow, but the ones with USB 2 booted just fine.

Ok. This defies everything I have read. Last night I made a clone on my G4, with Carbon Copy with USB, and two different pop up windows warned me that I couldnt boot with USB.

I guess you know more than the people at Carbon Copy Cloner.

* Not all Firewire and USB hard drive enclosures are capable of booting Mac OS X. Check with the manufacturer of your hard drive enclosure to verify that booting from the enclosure is explicitly supported. iPods must be enabled for disk use. iPods are not recommended for general use as a bootable drive, and USB-based iPods may not boot every model of Macintosh. In general, only Intel-based Macs can boot from USB hard drives. PowerPC Macs can only boot from a hard drive partitioned with the APM partitioning scheme. See the Preparing a hard drive for use with Carbon Copy Cloner and What makes a volume bootable? sections of the CCC documentation for more information on disk formatting and partitioning. These restrictions apply to the ability of the device to boot a Mac, any of these devices are suitable for general backup.

 

[Intell]

I happened to be searching for something on Google and I came across this old thread I posted in. Just thought I'd share a link to Apple's KB article that says USB booting is possible on PPC Macs.

https://support.apple.com/kb/TA25908

Second paragraph:

Beginning with the Power Mac G4 (AGP Graphics) and the iMac (Slot-Loading), two new features to USB are most apparent: support for USB audio devices and booting from USB drives.

 

[jbarley]

Well after reading this thread I just had to test this out for myself.
Until now I also was under the impression of "boot a PPC system from a USB drive, forget about it".
The last time I tried it was back when I had a G4 iBook, and I could not get it to work so I've never tried since.
Today with my dual 1.8 powermac totally different story, booted just fine from an external USB drive.
Just one slightly odd thing though, at least on my system, the USB drive could not be selected from the start up disk preference pane, it did not show up there.
But I could select it when starting up while pressing the 'alt' key and it booted just fine.
All-in-all, good to know.

 

[Negritude]

Yes, PowerPC Macs can be booted from *internal* USB ports (it will *not* work with ports provided by add-on cards).

The problem is, everything prior to the MDDs only had USB 1.1 internal ports, which were completely useless for that task, hence, the preference for Firewire.