eraser,
Yes, you can use pretty much any optical drive with parallel ATA to boot that iMac G4. No need for you to mod the drive door mechanisms at all for fitting. CD-ROM only, CD burning only, DVD-ROM, DVD-ROM and CDRW (combo drive) and DVD burning drives (Superdrives) will all work. Some of the more modern DVD burning drives with dual layer burning might work, but make sure you're burning under OS X Panther and later.
The Target Disk Mode trick is indeed a neat one! Any Mac with fire-wire ports on it can attempt this. Simply restart the Mac and immediately hold down the letter T on the keyboard, before the startup tone is heard. A solid blue background with a yellow dancing fire-wire symbol will appear on the screen. All you need now is a fire-wire cable (6-pin male to 6-pin male) and another fire-wire Mac (laptop or desktop). The Mac placed in Target Disk Mode will act as an external drive device. When both Macs are linked together with the fire-wire cable, the TDM Mac's drives will mount up on the second Mac's Finder (works with both hard drives and optical drives); yes, the second Mac you just boot normal. Works wonders when you need to install an OS on a Mac that won't let you from its optical drive being bad or a limitation from the TDM Mac's logic board. USB external drives will also mount as well.
Your hard drive now needs to be partitioned and formatted before installing the OS. First, make a decision if you want to have just one or two OSes installed, say Mac OS 9.2.2, Mac OS X 10.x.x or maybe both. If just OS X, then create 1 partition (The whole drive); if OS 9 and X, then 2 partitions ( I usually set the OS 9 partition at around 8 gigabytes and whatever larger portion for OS X). You can use Disk Utility off of the OS X Install disk to do all this preparation before installing.
NOTE: Some iMac G4s wouldn't allow you to boot and/or install OS 9 from startup; you can only use OS 9 in Classic Mode under OS X. You can use the Target Disk Mode trick to get OS 9 onto that iMac; just make sure the second Mac can boot to OS 9 natively, meaning at startup.
I know all this sounds obvious, but I'm listing this for our novices, beginners and n00bs out there.
73s de Phreakout. :rambo:
Yes, you can use pretty much any optical drive with parallel ATA to boot that iMac G4. No need for you to mod the drive door mechanisms at all for fitting. CD-ROM only, CD burning only, DVD-ROM, DVD-ROM and CDRW (combo drive) and DVD burning drives (Superdrives) will all work. Some of the more modern DVD burning drives with dual layer burning might work, but make sure you're burning under OS X Panther and later.
The Target Disk Mode trick is indeed a neat one! Any Mac with fire-wire ports on it can attempt this. Simply restart the Mac and immediately hold down the letter T on the keyboard, before the startup tone is heard. A solid blue background with a yellow dancing fire-wire symbol will appear on the screen. All you need now is a fire-wire cable (6-pin male to 6-pin male) and another fire-wire Mac (laptop or desktop). The Mac placed in Target Disk Mode will act as an external drive device. When both Macs are linked together with the fire-wire cable, the TDM Mac's drives will mount up on the second Mac's Finder (works with both hard drives and optical drives); yes, the second Mac you just boot normal. Works wonders when you need to install an OS on a Mac that won't let you from its optical drive being bad or a limitation from the TDM Mac's logic board. USB external drives will also mount as well.
Your hard drive now needs to be partitioned and formatted before installing the OS. First, make a decision if you want to have just one or two OSes installed, say Mac OS 9.2.2, Mac OS X 10.x.x or maybe both. If just OS X, then create 1 partition (The whole drive); if OS 9 and X, then 2 partitions ( I usually set the OS 9 partition at around 8 gigabytes and whatever larger portion for OS X). You can use Disk Utility off of the OS X Install disk to do all this preparation before installing.
NOTE: Some iMac G4s wouldn't allow you to boot and/or install OS 9 from startup; you can only use OS 9 in Classic Mode under OS X. You can use the Target Disk Mode trick to get OS 9 onto that iMac; just make sure the second Mac can boot to OS 9 natively, meaning at startup.
I know all this sounds obvious, but I'm listing this for our novices, beginners and n00bs out there.
73s de Phreakout. :rambo: