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Easily boot from USB 2.0 drives on PowerPC Macs
Authored by: johnsawyercjs on Mar 18, '07 12:49:38AM

Best I can tell, from my experience and that of people posting above:

• USB 1.1 and 2.0 ports/drives have always booted OS 9, on any Mac that can boot into OS 9.

• Macs up through the Powerbook G4 1.33 GHz, and at least some desktops of the same vintage, and maybe a few other pre-Intel PPC Macs (not sure why not all the pre-Intel PPC Macs), will boot from USB 1.1 and 2.0 ports/drives into OS 10.4.x (at least 10.4.6 and above--I didn't try earlier versions)--NOT OS 10.3.9 or earlier. Older Macs may need their firmware updated to the last version available for that Mac model, and not all USB drives might boot. Some USB drives will appear in Startup Manager (what you get when you hold down the Option key at startup), and others won't; when they don't, reset the Mac's PRAM, NVRAM, and Open Firmware (see my steps above), and that may allow some of them to appear in Startup Manager.

I found out that 10.4.x will boot from USB today, by surprise, when I had a USB drive in a 3.5" MacAlly drive enclosure, connected to an iMac G3 slot-loading, 350 MHz, since this model doesn't have Firewire ports, whose internal drive didn't yet have an OS on it; I had booted the Mac from an OS 9.1 CD to set its clock, then I restarted the Mac, and ejected the CD, and to my surprise, the Mac then saw my USB drive's OS 10.4.8 volume, and booted from it. It was slow, but not impossibly slow. It also appeared in this Mac's Startup Manager, and I could select it in the OS 10.4.8 Startup Disk prefpane. However, as I expected, I couldn't select the drive's OS 10.3.9 volume in Startup Disk--I just got a system beep when I clicked the Restart button--and when I selected the OS 10.3.9 volume in Startup Manager, it started to boot, showing the Apple logo on a white background, and the spinning activity indicator, but after about a minute, the Apple changed to a slashed circle.

I do remember reading that Apple never said it wasn't possible to boot OS X from USB ports--they said it was a decision they made to prevent it, because OS X booted and ran so slowly from USB. Some people have said it's a limitation of the firmware, or Open Firmware, but that doesn't appear to be the case, unless it's a few Mac models just prior to the Intel-based Macs that can't boot 10.4.x from USB, as illustrated by some user examples above, unless there was some other issue preventing them.



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Easily boot from USB 2.0 drives on PowerPC Macs
Authored by: johnsawyercjs on Apr 22, '08 12:58:19PM

A late clarification to my post above: I later found that OS 10.4.3 is the minimum OS X version for USB booting.



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