USB-Booting 10.3.9 on Mac Mini PPC G4 running 10.3.8

[kevinkenkel]

New to the boot game. Been doing a lot of research trying to figure out how to get this external drive to boot.

I have a Mac Mini PPC G4 running OSX 10.3.8, and i'm trying to boot 10.3.9 from external USB. In system preferences, the mac recognizes the external drive and presents it as an option as a boot disk. However, it will not restart with this drive once I select it.

Further, loading the machine holding OPTION only presents the internal drive as a bootable disk.

When i use OpenFirmware (via this tutorial), i get this error message: "Warning: sector size mismatch!"

When I run the same set of operations but this time using a different USB drive (with the same disk image as the other), I can boot initially, but then the Apple turns into a crossed-out circle and doesn't go any further.

Any suggestions?

 

[RedCroissant]

New to the boot game. Been doing a lot of research trying to figure out how to get this external drive to boot.

I have a Mac Mini PPC G4 running OSX 10.3.8, and i'm trying to boot 10.3.9 from external USB. In system preferences, the mac recognizes the external drive and presents it as an option as a boot disk. However, it will not restart with this drive once I select it.

Further, loading the machine holding OPTION only presents the internal drive as a bootable disk.

When i use OpenFirmware (via this tutorial), i get this error message: "Warning: sector size mismatch!"

When I run the same set of operations but this time using a different USB drive (with the same disk image as the other), I can boot initially, but then the Apple turns into a crossed-out circle and doesn't go any further.

Any suggestions?

Which external HDD do you have? Believe it or not, just because it has a FW port (400 or 800) doesn't mean that it's bootable. I found this out with a couple of WD external drives that were not bootable even though they were recognized and formatted properly as well.

 

[kevinkenkel]

Which external HDD do you have? Believe it or not, just because it has a FW port (400 or 800) doesn't mean that it's bootable. I found this out with a couple of WD external drives that were not bootable even though they were recognized and formatted properly as well.

Not connected over Firewire. It's a WD Elements 500GB drive.

 

[jbarley]

Why not just download the 10.3.9 update and update your system the proper way?
If the "image" you are trying to boot was not originally designed for your exact same model of Mac, then there's your problem.

 

[kevinkenkel]

Why not just download the 10.3.9 update and update your system the proper way?
If the "image" you are trying to boot was not originally designed for your exact same model of Mac, then there's your problem.

I did this update and nothing has changed. It still won't load the external USB drive (Sector size mismatch!) and when booting from an external thumb drive, i DO get OpenFirmware to recognize the library, but booting ends up with a DO NOT ENTER sign and nothing loads.

 

[eyoungren]

Just a quick question. Before you installed the OS on this drive did you partition it as APM?

I ask because WD says that the Elements drives are PC drives which means they are formatted as GUID. PowerPC Macs can't boot from GUID partitioned drives.