03-17-2005, 09:36 AM

I hope I'm Poasting in the right place. Sorry If I'm not.

Here is what's going on! I have a G4 running OS 9.1 and just bought a G5 1.8 with OSX. If I install the hard drive straight out of the g4 as a second hard drive in the G5 will it let me dual boot? Will it automaticly tell me that there are two OS's installed and let me choose which hard drive to boot from? If not, is there some settings that I can change to make it do this.

I have dual booted a windows machine with linux & windows 98 before but was a long time ago and, if i remember right, I had to set it up with linux to make it do it.

any help would be appreciated. I want to move to OSX but still need to run OS 9 and don't want to switch back & forth between computers.

03-17-2005, 10:01 AM

All recent Macs will boot in X only and will run OS 9 in classic mode only. This is part of the firmware and will not be bypassed by using a second hard disk.

03-17-2005, 10:11 AM

you can hold option during startup and a screen will allow you to choose which to boot from. or you can go into system preferencces>startup disk>select your default startup disk here.

03-17-2005, 10:18 AM

A G5 will boot from OS 9?

03-17-2005, 10:21 AM

A G5 will not boot up in to OS 9. You can only run OS 9 applications from with in the OS X environment.

03-17-2005, 10:40 AM

no, a g5 will not boot from os 9, but you could use that drive as just a slave drive, for storage and such.

03-17-2005, 11:56 AM

I don't think you can take a hard drive out of a g4 and put it in a g5, the connections are different. at least in my G4 dual 800 quicksilver and my G5 dual 1.8 they are.

03-17-2005, 05:05 PM

Originally Posted by MickMAC

I don't think you can take a hard drive out of a g4 and put it in a g5, the connections are different. at least in my G4 dual 800 quicksilver and my G5 dual 1.8 they are.

Yes they are. The G5 uses SATA as HD interface, while all G4 PowerMacs use IDE (aka parallel ATA).

And no, the PowerMac G5 will definitely not boot with OS 9 (as no other G5 and recent G4 Mac, including the Mac mini, does).
The last OS9-bootable Macs were the PowerMac G4 MDD FW400, the Rev. A Flat panel iMac, Rev. A eMac, iBook G3 and PowerBook G4 Titanium. Every Mac that is more recent, in it's product line, will not boot up in OS9.