Hi all,

Next question :)

How fussy are Powermacs over which DVD/CD drives they will work with? I'm thinking mostly about reading discs at this point, not too worried about writing them. I've read a variety of reports which don't all agree, and I suspect it might depend on which variety of Powermac as a lot of things seem to vary across the models. I'm hoping any old ATAPI drive will work, but it must be a firmware question and not a MacOS question as the optical drive has to work before OS drivers are loaded, so I know it won't be a case of MorphOS being different to MacOS.

Secondly, can they boot from an external USB drive? Again I've seen varying reports with most people saying they can't boot from USB, only firewire, and some saying they can boot from USB, and again it sounds like it might be something this is different across different models.

Anyone got experience of either of these?

> can they boot from an external USB drive? Again I've seen varying
> reports with most people saying they can't boot from USB, only
> firewire, and some saying they can boot from USB, and again it sounds
> like it might be something this is different across different models.

I'm not sure about the G4 PowerMacs, but the G4 Mac mini can't boot from USB. Of course, you might place the boot.img on a supported boot device and let it load the rest of the OS from the USB-attached device.

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6616&forum=3&start=4

Considering that the G4 PowerMacs are older than the G4 Mac mini, I'm quite confident that the above applies to them as well.

Mac mini can boot from USB, hd/cd drives, network, Firewire, this applies to other Macs supported by MorphOS too. OF has no problems when loading boot.img. though MorphOS itself will not continue to boot from network (Efika can due to special boot.img) or Firewire. It's kind of picky when it comes to continue booting from USB drives, you need a bit luck to have a "Poseidon boot friendly" USB drive, did not work with any of my USB sticks but i know it woks for some people.

[ Edited by Korni 16.04.2012 - 11:24 ]

> Mac mini can boot from USB

Interesting. I didn't know that. And I just stumbled upon a posting that I must have missed where you already said so two years ago:

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7031&forum=11&start=2

Sorry for confusing anyone here ;-)

exanian,
Quote:

I've been pretty lucky with the CD/DVD drives I have. Virtually all of them have worked with my older Quicksilver Powermac.

From what I'm reading, it seems that you have to have a valid boot partition first to put the boot.img in before you can boot off 'non-standard' devices - am I understanding right? So with a completely blank internal hard disc that you wanted to install MorphOS onto, you couldn't boot the MorphOS installer except from an optical drive?

My QuickSilver has black DVD-writer that surely wasn't supplied by Apple so yes non-Apple drives will work.

I did boot my Mini from USB into MorphOS for an experiment some years ago. AFAIR remember it requires some OF-magic and maybe some xtra voodoo.

Not really useable....

But with ISO-Boot it should be possible if you put both boot.img and the MorphOS-ISO on an USB stick and then start with the ISO as parameter. This way it would be possible to install MorphOS on HD without a working CD-drive (pretty much the same way as it's been done with the Efika). It would also not be needed that the USB-stick can be read by Poseidon as both the boot.img and the ISO are loaded via the OF.


Aunt Ethid:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20101011105729488
This should serve as a proper starting point. Just ignore all the OSX-babble and concentrate on what is done in the OF.

[ Edited by Kronos 16.04.2012 - 13:49 ]

No, bootimage is a MorphOS boot argument, you pass the ISO image using AmigaDOS path, so OF loads only boot.img and ISO part is up to MorphOS. If there is usbscsi0: in MorphOS bootmenu, then your USB disk is detected and you can boot from it. I also tried to write a MorphOS ISO image directly to USB drive using cat command, this did not help.

Thanks to all for the replies, and thanks Korni and Kronos for the info on booting from USB, looks really good.