Updating G4 Firmware

Over the weekend, I learned how to update the firmware on my G4 server. The poor thing was running Firmware version 4.1.old, and didn’t know about booting straight into OS X via holding the ‘x’ key at boot, network boot, or Firewire Target Mode.

Since the only Mac I’ve ever owned came with OSX, I’ve had no real use for Classic in any real sense, so I chose not to install it on this system. Once I downloaded the firmware updater, I found it would only run from OS 9.x (Classic). I’d never done a Classic installation before, but it wasn’t very difficult, with the exception of a few snags.

For some reason, the G4 wouldn’t boot off the Classic CD, even when I held down the ‘c’ key on boot. I had to select the Classic CD via the OSX “Startup Disk” control panel. Once I booted into Classic, it wouldn’t see the hard drives. I don’t know if this was because the drives were SCSI or because they had OSX installed on them. I simply installed Classic onto my 20GB portable Firewire drive.

After the installation completed, I booted off the Firewire drive and ran the firmware updater. However, after the machine rebooted, Classic still couldn’t see the SCSI hard drives, and still refused to boot straight into X via the keyboard boot-sequence.

At this point, I just unplugged the Firewire drive. “Try to boot off an unplugged drive, bastard!”

The G4 sat with a question-marky folder on the screen for about five minutes until realized there was an OSX partition.

I still don’t know why it won’t recognize the X key boot sequence, but I haven’t really it after the firmware upgrade, and I’m still not sure if I’m performing the keystroke properly.