Instructions on http://girlyngeek.blogspot.com.es/2011/04/usb-booting-on-powerpc-macintosh.html

Mac OS X 10.4 was the first one including the USB mass storage drivers on the kernelcache file of installer media. Previous ones will simply not the root device.

Somewhere in the G5 line USB support was added to the boot selector menu. My iMac G5 at least shows it.
All G4s I’ve tested support the previously mentioned method (MDD, Mini, iMac, eMac, Tibook), dunno about G3.

Apple contrary to other manufacturers use constant endianness for its filesystems. ProDOS is always little endian, even under Mac OS. HFS/HFS+ is always big endian, even under Intel Mac OS X.

Tux, can you upload your dump somewhere? I’d be interested in that myself. I wanted to create a gunkies ebook.

Cheers,
joe

That is right, although I have to wonder will it boot…? If I had more disks handy I’d experiment, but I don’t.

And I’m not sure about which byte order HFS stuff is stored in when its on PPC vs Intel. I’m sure OS X can deal with either, but I wanted to keep the PPC’s in the same order, which is why I basically rm -rf’d it vs letting it partition/format as the disk booted on the G5, and I didn’t want to make this thing into a toaster that quick.

Okay, I’ve got a read-only version at http://wonderful.madhacker.biz/gunkiesarchive/index.php/Main_Page

The dump has just finished. Please contact me for it.

I’m dumping out gunkies.org on my server, I’ll import it to a MediaWiki install once it’s finished if you want, or I’ll provide it to you.

To explain some more…

GUID is for EFI-enabled machines.
MBR is for Ye Olde Classic PCs.
The Apple Partition Table format is in fact, for PowerPC Macs.

Correct me if I’m wrong.

If I had more disks available I’d probably experiment, but I don’t. I also vaguely recall something about filesystems on intel being LSB, while on PPC being MSB. Sure they can read each others disks, but you don’t want your OS constantly bitflipping just to boot, that’d be silly. Also on the PPC there is a bunch of ‘hidden’ partitions for OS9 drivers, and some weird boot stuff that as a user you don’t see or interact with.. I’m pretty sure the intel macs don’t need any of that crap with their new fangled EFI BIOS, which from what I understand is similar to the old Amiga autoconfig, in which peripherals can provide EFI drivers on their own ROMS in a semi-sane manner, without partition trickery.

But I could be all wrong.

Well, with disk utility you can choose to partition with GUID , MBR or Apple partition table… isn’t it all you have to do to make a PPC disk bootable?

Why do you move?