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G4 Quicksilver Tiger DVD Boot Issue

dv-

Well-known member
So I snagged my dad's old G4 from a storage unit. It's an M8493 Quicksilver G4 that was originally 733Mhz/128/40GB and had been upgraded to 1GB of RAM and a 1.4GHz G4 from Sonnet. Had been sitting in cobwebs since 2010 or so.

Nobody remembered the old password, so I replaced the old HDD with an ATA/SD card and set about a clean install. Downloaded the 9.2 iso from Archive.org, burned to a DVD-R, and it booted/installed without a hitch. However, I did want to do a dual-boot setup with OS X 10.4, which it was running when I got it.

My issue is that the OS X Tiger DVD isos I've downloaded/burned (also from archive.org) don't appear to be bootable. I can't select them from the startup disk control panel, nor do they boot the machine when pressing 'C'. They don't show up when I hold down 'option' to get the boot menu either. When I try to let the installer reboot from the DVD, it throws a "-2" error. I triple-checked, and they are the PPC version - reviews/comments indicate other people have had them work OK.

Am I missing a "trick" to get those DVD ISOs bootable? (I am just downloading them on my PC and burning them in imgburn.) Or would the OS 9 install have reset some firmware thing I needed to have in order to boot from X again?
 

dv-

Well-known member
Additional Info: I was able to install 10.2 from a CD, and that works fine. It recognizes the 10.4 DVD as a bootable disk and I can select it in the Startup Disk control panel, but the computer still refuses to boot from it.

The DVD drive had trouble mounting the 10.2 disk 2, and hung the computer trying. (Although it was able to install stuff from it during the installation process.) I'm wondering if the DVD drive isn't just flaky?
 
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