Micromat Drive 10 does not boot Titanium PowerBook G4 1 GHz

Several readers are reporting that Micromat's Drive 10 disk maintenance utility does is not able to properly act as a startup disk for the PowerBook G4 Titanium 1 GHz.

It should be noted that the PowerBook G4 Titanium 1 GHz is the first Macintosh model to ship with a DVD-ROM as the startup/installation media. The DVD-ROM may include an updated hardware profile for the new PowerBook models, that is not provided on previous Mac OS X discs or on the Drive 10 CD.

Further digging revealed that the Drive 10 1.1.2 CD has a BootX file (System/Library/CoreServices/BootX) with a modification date of July 30, 2002. The mach_kernel file at the root level of the Drive 10 CD has a modification date of July 27, 2002. Obviously, this is several months before the November 6th release of the new SuperDrive PowerBooks.

"When I tried to boot off the Drive 10 CD (using the built in SuperDrive) I got repeated Kernel Panics. So I tried Drive 10 from an external Firewire Drive. Drive 10 reported problems with my Volume Structure which it recommended that I fix. When I tried to fix the progress bar went right across and it came up with an alert that I should fix the Volume Structure. This endless cycle went on for a few times, so I gave up. I then tried to Rebuild Volume Structures. Again I was told to repair the Volume Structures - and around and around we go. Still, I was not able to boot from the CD."

A technical representative from Micromat offered the following insight, echoing our DVD-ROM boot change theory:

"The operating system on a bootable CD has to provide support for the hardware of the particular Macintosh model you are trying to boot. If the system software files that provide support for hardware are older than the model you are trying to boot, a failure to boot may take place. When a failure to boot from a Mac OS 9 bootable CD takes place, the usual reason is that the Mac OS ROM file on the CD is older than the one on any CD that can boot that model (such as the Mac OS Installer CD supplied with that model)."

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