Seems there wasn’t a thread like this before on the Early Intel side (but a couple along those lines on the PowerPC forum), so why not make one?
I’ll start:
Recently, whilst cleaning out and setting up a mid-2007, turn-up-the-base iMac I got for the low, low price of free, I learnt something unexpected — sort of the way I remember learning the inverse with a DLSD PowerBook G4 (those were the very last of the PowerBook G4s, which had a completely redesigned logic board, in anticipation of a PowerPC future which never came to be).
Over on the PowerBook G4, once upon a time, I verified how, yes, one can run a GUID-partitioned boot volume on those last models, and the system will boot into Leopard. I remember there being a couple of, for want of a better word, hinky quirks about this combination which, in the end, had me re-doing it all with an Apple Partition Map.
Over on this A1224 (iMac7,1), base-how-low-can-you-go 2.0GHz Santa Rosa C2D, I stuck in an SSD previously used in my mid-2004 Power Mac G5 (running Leopard Server). I hadn’t even thought about the SSD’s partition tables when I threw it in there, but I mostly wanted to make sure the system was detecting the SSD and also to boot an already-extant OS X build.
Well, turns out it booted fine, but there were other quirks which kept me from using ethernet to connect to the network to install SL on it — namely, ethernet was also acting hinky. It was only able to use a connection from another Mac sharing internet via wifi. When trying to connect to the router, the ethernet port showed no activity, and in Network prefs, ethernet was red-lighted (wifi, on the channel I use at home, wasn’t seen at all).
It was only once I began to install a fresh copy of SL on it (imaged onto a second SSD partition on the just-installed SSD), when I got the “cannot install on this volume” warning, with an added note that the partitioning scheme was incompatible with an installation of Snow Leopard. Reflexively, I thought, “Well why wouldn’t this be a GUID SSD?” — forgetting it came from an earlier G5). It was only after I opened Disk Utility when I remembered how the SSD was (of course) set up with APM!
So yah, there was a time, a weird slushy window, when very late PowerPC Macs could boot from a GUID-parition scheme installation of OS X, and the earliest Intel Macs could boot into OS X on an Apple Partition Map disk. But within both oddball environments, there were weird quirks which managed to find their way to the user’s attention — sometimes fairly quickly.
So yah. I had no idea!
What unusual quirks have you all discovered on Early Intel Macs?
I’ll start:
Recently, whilst cleaning out and setting up a mid-2007, turn-up-the-base iMac I got for the low, low price of free, I learnt something unexpected — sort of the way I remember learning the inverse with a DLSD PowerBook G4 (those were the very last of the PowerBook G4s, which had a completely redesigned logic board, in anticipation of a PowerPC future which never came to be).
Over on the PowerBook G4, once upon a time, I verified how, yes, one can run a GUID-partitioned boot volume on those last models, and the system will boot into Leopard. I remember there being a couple of, for want of a better word, hinky quirks about this combination which, in the end, had me re-doing it all with an Apple Partition Map.
Over on this A1224 (iMac7,1), base-how-low-can-you-go 2.0GHz Santa Rosa C2D, I stuck in an SSD previously used in my mid-2004 Power Mac G5 (running Leopard Server). I hadn’t even thought about the SSD’s partition tables when I threw it in there, but I mostly wanted to make sure the system was detecting the SSD and also to boot an already-extant OS X build.
Well, turns out it booted fine, but there were other quirks which kept me from using ethernet to connect to the network to install SL on it — namely, ethernet was also acting hinky. It was only able to use a connection from another Mac sharing internet via wifi. When trying to connect to the router, the ethernet port showed no activity, and in Network prefs, ethernet was red-lighted (wifi, on the channel I use at home, wasn’t seen at all).
It was only once I began to install a fresh copy of SL on it (imaged onto a second SSD partition on the just-installed SSD), when I got the “cannot install on this volume” warning, with an added note that the partitioning scheme was incompatible with an installation of Snow Leopard. Reflexively, I thought, “Well why wouldn’t this be a GUID SSD?” — forgetting it came from an earlier G5). It was only after I opened Disk Utility when I remembered how the SSD was (of course) set up with APM!
So yah, there was a time, a weird slushy window, when very late PowerPC Macs could boot from a GUID-parition scheme installation of OS X, and the earliest Intel Macs could boot into OS X on an Apple Partition Map disk. But within both oddball environments, there were weird quirks which managed to find their way to the user’s attention — sometimes fairly quickly.
So yah. I had no idea!
What unusual quirks have you all discovered on Early Intel Macs?