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General discussion

Can G4 Powerbooks boot off the Firewire port?

Mar 5, 2011 9:51PM PST

Can G4 Powerbooks boot off the Firewire port?

Discussion is locked

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Yes
Mar 5, 2011 9:56PM PST

Yes, but only some of the very last models will be able to boot off USB. Pretty much all PPC Macs could boot off Firewire, but only a very select few ever got the ability to boot off USB.

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Yup
Mar 11, 2011 10:17AM PST

PowerBook G4's can boot off Firewire devices w/o problem. They will NOT boot off USB devices; only Intel CPUs can boot off both ports.

So, if you have a clone of your internal HD in a Firewire disk, portable or not, you should have no problem booting off of it.

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Slightly misleading information here
Mar 11, 2011 10:46PM PST

In order to boot into OS X from an external drive, via Firewire, one needs to have an external drive that has a valid OS X system folder on the drive. (OS X needs to be installed on the drive)

It is NOT a requirement that you have a clone of your internal HD.

P

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Since we're nitpicking
Mar 12, 2011 12:46AM PST

Since we're nitpicking... Some of the very last PPC models COULD boot from USB drives. IIRC, it involved some open firmware magic, so it wasn't exactly a simple matter to accomplish like with FW drives, but it COULD be done.

Now, whether or not the PB G4 the OP has is one of those capable of this is unknown. Generally the last, maybe second to last if the model was refreshed pretty rapidly, refresh of each model could do this. Right before the switch to the x86 platform.