I cloned the original SCSI hard drive to a new IDE hard drive with hopes of using the IDE and saving the SCSI for backup. (G4 AGP Graphics board 450mhz) When trying to boot to the IDE drive I just get the flashing ?. Tried holding option key down and forcing boot, but it never works. I know jumpers are right. Tried both IDE ports on mb. Tried removing all original SCSI cards and drive-no good. I know the clone(IDE) is valid and should work because I'm able to boot with it when it is inside an external usb case, and probably a firewire case too. When I boot with the SCSI drive with the IDE connected and go to change the boot drive within the os, it says there is no system folder on the IDE drive, which I know is incorrect, and it wants to initialize it, but I can't do that because it will negate my whole reason for cloning first. I'm a pc tech, and can't figure out how to tell the mac that there's a hard drive on its ide channel. No BIOS I guess. My 2 guesses are: 1) maybe flashing pram would work? -I'm scared to try without a betting understanding of what it will do. 2) Problem is occurring because original drive only has the scsi drivers, and drivers haven't been loaded telling the g4 to look for ide drives. This might explain why it did work on usb port if those drivers were loaded anyway. The basic problem shouldn't have to do with the fact that the drive is cloned, but please keep in mind that it was cloned from a SCSI to a IDE, and the only potential problem from this cloning process would be if there were no ide port drivers or something to that effect on the original SCSI drive. Anybody understand how to fix this???

To clarify a bit: When I boot with both the SCSI and IDE drives connected, the SCSI boots to OS 9.2, and I can see that the g4 recognizes that there is a hard drive attached to the IDE channel by going to "apple system profiler-devices and volumes", but it says no volumes are mounted on that drive and won't read anything on it unless I initialize it first, which I don't want to do because it has everything I want on it. (I KNOW there ARE volumes on this drive and I KNOW there is a system folder on this IDE drive.) Because it's unmounted, I can't choose it as a boot disk in the control panel. BUT I can boot from the same IDE drive when it's loaded in an external usb case. How do I tell my mac to recognize an IDE hard drive to boot to on the IDE cable/ ATA port (jumpered correctly) if it's used to booting to a SCSI Drive? Probably something easy, but this is my first week with Macintosh instead of PC.

Ok, Putting an IDE hard drive with OS X Panther on the IDE port booted just fine. I'm guessing it is an issue with drivers for that IDE port not having been loaded onto the original SCSI drive in OS 9.2 (which I cloned to the IDE drive I'm trying to boot to), on this G4 since it wasn't used. How can I load them, if this is indeed the problem?