Since when can an Intel Mac be booted off a PPC boot drive?

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Eleventh Hour Sound
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Since when can an Intel Mac be booted off a PPC boot drive?

Post by Eleventh Hour Sound »

OK, I'm usually pretty current on this stuff but today I was shocked when for fun I hooked my MacBook Pro (Intel) machine to my G5's (PPC) boot drive and my MacBook Pro booted of it!

When did this happen? Does the same version of OS X boot both PPC and Intel machines now?
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Tomrabbit
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Post by Tomrabbit »

Boy, I didn't think so either. That would be good news here as I want to get a new MBP and I have a PPC now.

Let's see what the others say.

Thanks for the report.
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Timeline
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Post by Timeline »

OK I'm going to try that now....


oops, I sold my G5...

:)
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Post by Eleventh Hour Sound »

Timeline wrote:OK I'm going to try that now....


oops, I sold my G5...

:)
Ha Ha ha :)

The even crazier part was first I put my G5 in target disk mode and booted a MacBook Pro off of it over fire wire!

Then I took the boot drive, put it in a SATA enclosure and tried to boot off of it. No Go. (Either a limitation of SATA or the enclosure, or the Sonnet express 34 Sata card in my MacBook Pro)

Then I tried a different enclosure that had a USB port so I hooked it up to my MacBook Pro and yes... My Intel machine booted off the drive out of a PPC Mac G5.
DP11.1, 16" MacBookPro 2.3Ghz 8 Core i9's 32GB Ram 1TB SSD, (2) external 1TB Samsung SSD's , Steven Slate SSD 5.5 and Trigger Drums, ML-1 Mic and VSX Headphones, Omnisphere 2, Trilian, Ivory2, EW, MSI, MX-4, Philharmonik 2, Komplete, Reason, Live, Melodyne, IK Multi's Total Studio, ARC, T-RackS, SampleTron, AMG's KickA--Brass. and my beloved guitars :-)
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Post by Eleventh Hour Sound »

OK, I thought this was earth shattering news! So does this mean that we can just mix and match the OS from our old G5 and New Intel Mac... it doesn't matter... It all works...?[/list]
DP11.1, 16" MacBookPro 2.3Ghz 8 Core i9's 32GB Ram 1TB SSD, (2) external 1TB Samsung SSD's , Steven Slate SSD 5.5 and Trigger Drums, ML-1 Mic and VSX Headphones, Omnisphere 2, Trilian, Ivory2, EW, MSI, MX-4, Philharmonik 2, Komplete, Reason, Live, Melodyne, IK Multi's Total Studio, ARC, T-RackS, SampleTron, AMG's KickA--Brass. and my beloved guitars :-)
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Post by stephentayler »

Unfortunately you can't use eSATA for boot drives.... I was rather hoping this would work for my MBP

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Post by sonsey »

AFAIK, the FULL install disks of Leopard were "FAT" binaries... meaning both the INTEL and PPC code is in there... the machine just chooses which one to run. Not sure if it would work with the install disks that COME with an INTEL, but the short answer is yes... an install of 10.5 on a PPC drive can boot an INTEL machine.
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Post by gearboy »

This is great news. I'm planning on upgrading to a Mac Pro once the next generation comes out. Can I simply remove my Tiger 10.4.11 boot drive AND my second 500GB record drive and install them into the Mac Pro? this will give me Dual boot between Tiger and Leopard in the Mac Pro "Intelecaster" and save me from some stuff.

However, I suppose that anything that I have on that drive, meaning DP4.61, WILL NOT boot because it isn't UB. So...

Oh well. I should have upgraded to DP5 2 years ago.

Jeff
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Eleventh Hour Sound
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Post by Eleventh Hour Sound »

gearboy wrote:This is great news. I'm planning on upgrading to a Mac Pro once the next generation comes out. Can I simply remove my Tiger 10.4.11 boot drive AND my second 500GB record drive and install them into the Mac Pro? this will give me Dual boot between Tiger and Leopard in the Mac Pro "Intelecaster" and save me from some stuff.

However, I suppose that anything that I have on that drive, meaning DP4.61, WILL NOT boot because it isn't UB. So...

Oh well. I should have upgraded to DP5 2 years ago.

Jeff
I guess this only works for Leopard 10.5.x
DP11.1, 16" MacBookPro 2.3Ghz 8 Core i9's 32GB Ram 1TB SSD, (2) external 1TB Samsung SSD's , Steven Slate SSD 5.5 and Trigger Drums, ML-1 Mic and VSX Headphones, Omnisphere 2, Trilian, Ivory2, EW, MSI, MX-4, Philharmonik 2, Komplete, Reason, Live, Melodyne, IK Multi's Total Studio, ARC, T-RackS, SampleTron, AMG's KickA--Brass. and my beloved guitars :-)
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