Page 1 of 1
Since when can an Intel Mac be booted off a PPC boot drive?
Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 5:41 pm
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?
Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 6:27 pm
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.
Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 6:29 pm
by Timeline
OK I'm going to try that now....
oops, I sold my G5...
Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 6:41 pm
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.
Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 10:36 pm
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]
Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 11:35 pm
by stephentayler
Unfortunately you can't use eSATA for boot drives.... I was rather hoping this would work for my MBP
Stephen
Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 9:24 am
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.
Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 9:39 am
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
Posted: Thu Aug 14, 2008 12:05 pm
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