Power Macintosh G4

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I have an old Power Macintosh G4 with NO operating system or official CD and I'm NOT willing to to buy the official OS (mainly because it sucks)
is there a way to boot from a CD/USB drive?
I already know how to make a bootable USB/CD and ive installed OS's this way many times before, I just don't have much experience with the older Mac hardware
Just so you know I have OS's with PowerPC, I386 and X86 architectures at my disposal
 

pigoo3

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Your Mac's Specs
2017 15" MBP, 16gig ram, 1TB SSD, OS 10.15
What OS do you want to install on it (you didn't really say)?

FYI...you mentioned having "OS's with PowerPC". This is exactly the type of OS that the Powermac G4 was designed for. Mac OS X versions 10.0 thru 10.5 were all PowerPC OS's.

Sure you can boot the computer from a CD. This is the format that the Mac OS came in for OS's 10.0 thru 10.4.

- Nick
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
Trust you are not considering downloading pirated operating systems. Well known malware lurk there.
 

cwa107


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Your Mac's Specs
14" MacBook Pro M1 Pro, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD
Ive already downloaded that how to I boot it?

Assuming you downloaded the disc image noted in the link Harry provided above, you'll just need to use the burning tool of your choice to write it to disc.

Pop the disc in the Mac, power it off and back on again. Immediately press and hold the 'C' key (or press and hold the alt/option key, to see the boot menu) and it should be pretty self-explanatory from there.
 
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Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
And I believe you will have to burn the image on a Mac. If you have access to another Mac, drag the image to the left hand pane of Disk utility, pop in a DVD and hit the burn button.
 

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