Creating an OS 9 partition on new hardware

Oct 14, '02 08:48:15AM

Contributed by: Air Mapster

This hint is for owners of the newest machines, which ship with Jaguar preinstalled. If you're like me, the first thing you want to do (after checking that the factory configuration works OK) is repartition the hard drive and install OS 9 and X on separate partitions. Only problem? The new machines don't include a proper OS 9 install disc, and the Software Restore discs only want to restore your machine to the factory configuration (OS 9 and Jaguar on the same partition). So unlike owners of older machines, you can't just pop in the OS 9 install disc and do a clean install. Here's how to get it done...

[Editor's note: I hope to test this one at some point when the budget allows new hardware!]

The process:

  1. Restart with the Jaguar install CD in the drive and hold down the C key to boot off of it.
  2. When the installer comes up, select Disk Utility from the menu and repartition your hard drive the way you want it. I named my partitions "Mac OS 9" and "Mac OS X" to avoid confusion, but do what you want. Make sure you check the box to install OS 9 drivers or you won't be able to boot it natively on the partition you've selected.
  3. Once the partition is done, quit Disk Utility and continue with the installation. I highly recommend doing a custom installation and deselecting the multilanguage and localization support.
  4. Reboot to your newly installed Jaguar and insert the first Software Restore CD (it may be named differently depending on what machine you got).
  5. Open up Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities) and on the command line type:
     % cd "/Volumes/Software Restore/.images"
    Replace "Software Restore" with the name of your CD as it appears on the desktop (mine had "iBook" at the beginning).
  6. Type ls at the command line and you should see some disk image (.dmg) files, including OS9General.dmg (again yours may be named differently than mine - I don't know).
  7. Mount the disk image from the command line with open ./OS9General.dmg.
  8. Open up the mounted disk image in the Finder. Also open up your empty OS 9 partition. Select all folders in the disk image and copy them to the OS 9 partition.
Once this was done, I could go into the Classic preference pane and it would recognize the system on the OS 9 partition. The Startup Disk pane also recognized the OS 9 system, and I could successfully boot OS 9 this way. But holding down the Option key at bootup only recognized OS X in the firmware, so there was more work to be done: I needed to re-bless the OS 9 System Folder from OS X. According to an article in Apple's knowledge base, here's how to do that:
  1. Open System Preferences and click on Startup Disk.
  2. Choose the OS 9 System Folder.
  3. Click on Show All in the upper left corner of the window. When it asks if you want to change, select Change.
  4. Click on Startup Disk and repeat the procedure a second time.
At this point, I could boot my new iBook into either OS 9 or OS X from the firmware by holding down the Option key.

Follow a similar procedure to restore any other software that came with your machine (AppleWorks, World Book Encyclopedia and a few games came with mine). Just pop in each of the Restore CDs, go to the .images directory of that CD from the Terminal command line, copy the dmg file to the hard disk, mount it, and copy the files you need. Doing it this way, you can selectively restore any software without using the all-or-nothing restore program (which kind of defeats the whole purpose of doing this).

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Mac OS X Hints
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