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Author Topic: Mac OS 9 booting on: PowerBook G4 17" Aluminum 5,1 (Detailed Posts)  (Read 467380 times)

UnexpectedBomb

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Re: Mac OS 9 booting on: PowerBook G4 17" Aluminum 5,1 (Detailed Posts)
« Reply #160 on: September 20, 2026, 12:08:12 PM »

Here are the logs.

I'm also attaching photos of my card - you cannot get more generic than that...

After checking out those logs, my suspicion is that your USB drive might be MSDOS-formatted; my USB 2.0 driver only accepts Mac OS Standard (HFS) or Mac OS Extended (HFS+) for the time being. There should be a fifth log file called "USB Disk Log", either on your boot volume root or in your System Folder; send me that log and I can confirm. If your GOODRAM is already HFS/HFS+ then this theory is dead and we'll look elsewhere. If you already have another drive formatted to HFS/HFS+ then definitely give that one a try, or format your current GOODRAM to that and see if it fixes it (unless you have important stuff on there, in which case I'd wait until I get that log from you).
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LarsG5

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After checking out those logs, my suspicion is that your USB drive might be MSDOS-formatted

You are right, I didn't think to mention that before, but yes, it was indeed FAT formatted.

There should be a fifth log file called "USB Disk Log", either on your boot volume root or in your System Folder

I cannot find such log anywhere on my HDD :/

Format your current GOODRAM to HFS+ and see if it fixes it

That's exactly what I did - I formatted my thumb drive to HFS+ on Tiger and well, it made a difference. I attach the logs below.

Right after booting OS9 the whole system freezes for around 30 second, then I get the message shown in USB unreadable 1.jpg and USB unreadable 2.jpg.

When I try formatting my thumb drive with Mac OS Standard, I get the message shown in Mac OS Standard.jpg.

When I try with Mac OS Extended, I get the messages shown in Mac OS Extended 1.jpg and  Mac OS Extended 2.jpg. Then it proceeds to Initialize.jpg but there is no progress going on, the whole system freezes.

Soo, in conclusion, you are definitely onto something here.
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LarsG5

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(Photos part 2)
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UnexpectedBomb

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You are right, I didn't think to mention that before, but yes, it was indeed FAT formatted.

Perfect, I'm glad that was it. Also, the USB Disk Log was a diagnostic file that I had generated in earlier builds but I forgot that I removed it, sorry about the wild goose chase, haha.

We're super close now to getting USB 2.0 working. I'm thinking maybe there was some weirdness somehow with the Tiger formatting of the drive... it's strange that even with the correct formatting, your drive still did not mount. This could just be OS 9 being picky about it. So I'd try formatting it directly in OS 9:

1) Boot without the USB drive inserted
2) Once the desktop is loaded, plug it into an on-board USB port, not the card
3) Assuming it mounts, go Special > Erase Disk... (or initialize it if asked)
4) Format as HFS or HFS+
5) Try plugging it into the card

Let's see if that works. My hope is this is the last hurdle and you'll have USB 2.0 in Mac OS 9 at that point.
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