Chosen Solution
Recently I bought PowerBook G4 Titanium very cheap and I want it for my personal collection. PowerBook was sold as “for parts”, so unfortunately I do not know much about its hardware condition (from the outside, it looks almost like brand new, almost no cosmetic dents or scratches). When I power it on, only blinking question mark folder shows up, which means there is no OS, so I decided to open it up. I find out, that there is no hard drive inside, but I at least wanted to try run OS X installation. Since I dont own OS X installation CD and I dont have device with DVD drive, I decided to boot instalation of OS X from USB. I created OS X Tiger installation USB using TransMac and find guide which tell that I need to enter Open Firmware by pressing Command + Option + O + F and then Power button to allow boot from USB. But there is a problem. When I do it, nothing happen, PowerBook again shows only a questionmark folder. Also Option + PowerButton to see boot priority doesnt work. What could be wrong? Would startup key combinations work, if I use external USB keyboard? (since I dont know if the build-in keyboard works). Couldnt be a problem that there is no hard drive inside? Thank you very much for every answer
Technically, the PowerBook’s G4 don’t have the needed firmware to boot from USB drives. I only know of G5 based systems having a tweak within its release of Open Firmware that could do it, but there are a few issues just the same! You need a USB 2.0 drive and the file system needs to be the older HFS not the HFS+ to work. If you want to pursue this I would recommend you locate the grey disks that came with the system or OS-X Leopard (10.5.8) retail disk set. Then you can boot up under the CD/DVD that come in the set (depending on what optical drive your system has). Your other option is finding a FireWire drive that is setup with a bootable OS-X Leopard on it.
