A masterpiece! This is how it looks from the inside
Hi friends and welcome to a new episode of Nomadic Dmitry Channel
Today we are going to talk about iMac G4 and making it boot from a SD drive
Right now I'm cloning the internal hard drive to SD card
I want to replace the old hard drive of this computer to SSD
I think that it doesn't make much sense to replace it with an IDE drive
I decided to use an adapter to convert from IDE to SD card
We just plug a typical IDE cable to SD card
It even has much more memory
I think that the speed is going to be faster, but we all know that IDE interface was never fast
But it still should be faster (and less noisy)
Also I have a plan to replace the internal DVD drive here with a SATA DVD drive
The combo drive that's installed there doesn't work and needs to be take out
And CD/DVD drive should be useful for transferring the data
This is the DVD drive from the other computer that I have
This is the IDE to SATA adapter that I'm going to use
I think iMac G4 is a great computer that could run Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X Tiger
You can even use Mac OS X Leopard here
Let's proceed with a disassembly once it finishes copying file to SD card
We are going to use T6X50 screwdriver. Not the best match, but I think it should work
Even the back panel looks like masterpiece
This is the memory stick and next to it is a Wi-Fi card (Airport Card)
Airport card is outdated, so you should be better using an Ethernet cable here
The Ethernet is located right here
Let's pick another screwdriver and remove the remaining part of the frame
i always had some problems finding the right screwdriver for any computer
This iMac is simple to disassemble comparing to other models because it has monitor attached separately
Later iMacs have monitor and internals attached together
Let's see if I can take it apart now
It is very dusty inside the computer
There is also a memory unit inside
It has 2 memory slots for the memory
Then there is a CD/DVD drive and Hard Drive
This is how it looks from the inside and we can proceed with disconnecting the cables
But I think that I should leave those and only disconnect the Hard Drive and CD/DVD
The best way to remove dust is using your hands (Not really. I'm kidding)
Now we should be able to lift that remaining part which has CD/DVD and Hard Drive
Power cable is really hard to disconnect here for some reason
Such a mess here. Computers look much more efficient today
We have iMac G4 fan right here for ventilation
This component is actually a modem right here
People have still used modems back then
Take a look at memory
There is a regular memory stick inside and then there is a laptop stick on the other side
Apple has combined two types of memory in one computer
Hard Drive has an Apple logo. Seems like all iMacs used to have it on Hard Drives back in the day
This is how the CD/DVD tray works
I removed this panel from there
This looks strange
Honestly, I think I'm just going to remove all that and take cables out of the computer
This way I can easily connect any devices I want at any time
It looks a bit better now
Still a bit dusty, but it's alright
I'll just connect everything together and see how it works
I have SD card connected to IDE cable
Let's hope that it's going to boot fine
Wow, it seems to be working indeed
Seems like there is a much less noise now
Let's just wait for a bit
Just to verify that Hard Drive itself still works I attached the hard drive
And loaded Mac OS X Tiger from there and it works as expected
I don't know why SD card doesn't boot Mac OS
At least it detects it which means I'll figure this out soon
Let's try something else. Let's try to boot into Mac OS 9
For this reason we are going to use Open Firmware which is like a BIOS for PowerPC computers
We can specify a specific folder to boot from which contains Mac OS 9 system
To go to OpenFirmware press "Command + O + F"
Let's type the "boot" command here and see if it works
It's better, but it still doesn't boot Mac OS
Next step was to reset PRAM. This is the setting that stores startup drives and things like that
Maybe if I reset those values it's going to work.. Or not
Also, as I said in the beginning of the video I have a converter from IDE to SATA
And I checked that I can use my DVD drive here just fine
I was able to boot into Mac OS 9 installation CD
This means I can install Mac OS 9 here
Eventually, I decided to format the SD card and create Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X Tiger partitions
Remember that for OS 9 you should disable journaling for the file system
I'm going to install Mac OS 9 now
I was able to install Mac OS 9 here
Next thing to try is to install Mac OS X Tiger later on
reason so i don't know so here it works just
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I think it's a nice project that you could try too
It made this iMac G4 run faster and almost without any noise