IMac – Can this 800 MHz iMac G4 boot into Mac OS 9

bootclassic-mac-oscompatibilityimacpowerpc

I'm trying to find a legacy Mac that I can use to boot into Mac OS 9. I've found an old iMac G4 in the classified ads, but it has Mac OS X currently installed and I'm not sure if it's compatible with Mac OS 9. This is what I could learn about it by looking at Hardware Overview in System Profiler:

Machine Name:       iMac
Machine Model:      PowerMac4,2
CPU Type:           PowerPC G4 (2.1)
Number of CPUs:     1
CPU Speed:          800 MHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 256 KB
Memory:             1 GB
Bus Speed:          100 MHz
Boot ROM Version:   4.4.0f1
Serial Number:      <redacted>

Based on this information, it seems to match two different models on EveryMac: M8535LL/A and M9105LL/A. But only one of those models has support for booting into Mac OS 9. Is there any way for me to identify which exact model is this computer? Do they have different Boot ROM? I want to know for sure before I buy it, and I can't try installing Mac OS 9 on somebody else's computer.

Best Answer

This is going off of memory so unfortunately, I don't have a reference.

But the partial serial number that you provided QT219 gives us a clue as to when it was manufactured:

  • QT - I believe this is the device (i.e. iMac), but it's not really relevant
  • 2 - The year it was manufactured. 0 = 2000, 1 = 2001, 2 = 2002, etc.
  • 19 - Week in which it was manufactured. 19 = 19th week.

So, just looking up the week numbers for 2002, we can deduce that the iMac was manufactured sometime between May 6th and May 12th, 2002. That model, M8535LL/A, was made between Jan. 2002 and Feb. 2003, is the model that can run Mac OS 9

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