# iMac g4 refuses to boot from cd



## benaiah (Apr 17, 2012)

I need to reinstall OS X on an imac g4 but it will not boot any cd's.
I am trying to install Tiger (10.4) while it currently has 10.3.9.

I have tried the following:

Pressing "c" after the bong
it failed by ignoring the cd and booting from the hard drive

pressing opt
it failed by showing only the hard drive
resetting the pram and nvram
no difference

using "startup disk" in system preferences
it never reboots

the disc works fine in pearpc

Please help me with this mac as it constantly freezes and needs to be reformatted.


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## Legit (Apr 19, 2012)

Can you read the disk outside of the booting process on this machine?

What I'm getting at is a lot of G4s have CDROM drives and I believe Tiger only came on a DVD. Well that and if your drive even works... 

Holding "c" on boot until the chime goes off and then the slow slow load of off the device is the normal method that I have used.


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

Question is, is this a retail copy of OS X, or a burned copy? Only a retail copy, bought, will work. Burned copies or the grey restore disks will not (unless it's the grey restore disk that came with your Mac).


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