USB or FireWire booting a Power Mac G4

[Jethryn Freyman]

466MHz "Digital Audio" model G4 Power Mac here, running 10.5.8.

Thinking of giving it a CPU and GPU upgrade sometime in the future, as well as a PCI USB 2.0 card.

I've done some research, but still have some questions:

1. Is this model of Mac USB bootable? (specifically, from a USB 2.0 drive on a USB 2.0 port on a PCI expansion card)
2. Is this model of Mac FireWire bootable? (using the built in FireWire 400 ports). From what I understand it IS bootable from Firewire (according to Apple's website.)
3. Anybody got experience of doing this?

My intention would be to upgrade it and then run it from an external USB or FireWire 400 hard disk instead of from a disk from the built in IDE.

 

[Hrududu]

Yes it will boot from Firewire, but not from USB. Any Mac with built in FireWire can boot to it (and even some without). Booting to USB is an Intel thing. I am curious as to why you would rather use FireWire to boot over the internal PATA bus.

 

[Jethryn Freyman]

Yes it will boot from Firewire, but not from USB. Any Mac with built in FireWire can boot to it (and even some without). Booting to USB is an Intel thing. I am curious as to why you would rather use FireWire to boot over the internal PATA bus.

Thanks for the answer.

I was thinking about Firewire instead of the PATA bus to overcome the 128GB capacity limit on over PATA.

 

[garycurtis]

+1. I frequently boot from a Firewire 400 external backup drive attached to my G-4 tower.

 

[Hrududu]

Why not get an internal ATA controller card? Just curious cuz its you're going to get much better speed from an ATA bus than FireWire.

 

[yamu]

A Digital Audio Powermac can boot from usb or usb 2 PCI Card. In fact, every Powermac that can boot natively into OS 9 can boot from usb, except maybe the last MDDs. I even did that back in 2001 with OS9 and a USB Zip Drive. I booted Tiger with no problems from an usb stick over usb2 pci-card, holding alt-key at startup.

Only Powermacs hat can't boot OS9 cannot boot from usb.

But it is very, very slow and i don't recommend it. Powermacs are slower
over usb/usb2 than intels, firewire is definitly the better choice or best would be a sata pci card.

 

[Bill Gates]

I found this online whilst looking at hard drive benchmarks and thought it might be relevant to you: http://www.speedtools.com/ATA6.html

 

[reddrag0n]

Not all G4's can boot from firewire. Only the G4 models with an AGP graphics card can boot from firewire. The original G3 B&W and G4 Yikes can't boot FW.
Apple states this on their site. KB HT2699