Q: Booting off USB with Power Mac G4 Graphite (500Mhz AGP)

A few pre-Intel Macs like the first few iMacs are USB-bootable but they are in the minority. Most PowerPC Macs desktops need to boot from a FireWire device. One member may return here to post his successful experiences with making non-USB boot Macs boot from USB, but feedback left by others show the results of his procesdure are often spotty. If interested, he has posted instructions on Youtube. Your mileage may vary.

There are some good external optical drives on the used/pulled market that are Mac Bootable (not all are). I have a Sony DRX-820UL-T external DVD combo drive that has FireWire 400 and USB and has proven Mac-bootable as far back as a circa 2000 iMac G3. I picked it up with most accessories for US$5 at a rummage sale. This article has most of the details:

http://www.creativemac.com/article/Sony-DRX-820UL-T-Review-48394

Here are some on eBay:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0. XSony+DRX-820UL-T.TRS0&_nkw=Sony+DRX-82…

Please note that I can only vouch for the exact model i have. Others may not have FireWire connectivity or may not be Mac Bootable.

Do you have a 12Mbps (bits !) stick, and can you make it bootable?

I don't think so. It is not really compatible...

It should be possible to run OS9 on that machine.

You can boot from a CD.

Lex, OP says the optical drive is not working properly.

Yes. He has to borrow or otherwise arrange that.

Ya know, Lex's post triggered another thought. Your optical drive is very old and could simply be very dirty. For US$5-15 you can buy a cleaning disk for optical drives. They often restore apparently dead optical drive to full function. If the drive spins but doesn't read a disk, cleaning is the first thing i would try.

    tks

I took a bootable external firewire harddrive from owc.  I pulled out the hd and swapped in a sony dvd drive.  I placed the drive on top of the external.

I installed tiger on my imac g3 600 with this contraption.  Still use it on my mac mini to play dvds.

R