Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!

A workaround for the 8gb partition limit on Beige G3s Install
I have around eight Beige G3's and really would like to upgrade them to Panther. So from a previous hint, I checked out XPostFacto. To get Panther to install and run on the Beige G3's, I had to buy a bunch of Radeon 7000 video cards, but Xpostfacto is awesome; I had to use version 3.0a15. Everything works like a charm! Firewire, USB, all iApps (except iDVD), Office, everything!

But there has always been one little annoyance. The OS X installers (including Panther) will only install on the first partition, which has to be 8GB or less on Beige G3s. There's a solution...

I have a bunch of 120GB drives, so I made two partitions with the OS 9 boot disk. First partition was ~119GB, second partition was 1024MB. Then I installed OS 9 onto the 1GB partition. Booted into OS 9 and installed all updates, drivers, and XPostFacto. Then I removed drive from the Beige G3 and put it into a newer Mac, and installed Panther onto the first partition including all updates.

Next, I moved the drive back to the beige G3, booted into OS 9, ran XPostFacto, set the NVram input to "keyboard," and output to the new video card. Finally clicked Restart to OS 10.3.3 and Yahooooo! It all came up just fine. StarWar's Pod Racing even works great under Classic. BTW, I packed these machines with 768mb of ram, 120GB drives, ATI radeon 7000 video cards, and overclocked from 300mhz to 350mhz or so.

Hope this helps those who want a little more life out of their Beige G3's.

[robg adds: I (obviously?) haven't tested this hint, but if it really does provide a workaround for the 8gb limit on Beige G3s, then I know a few folks who will be quite interested, so here it is. If someone does try this, please post if you are successful or not...]
    •    
  • Currently 3.00 / 5
  You rated: 4 / 5 (4 votes cast)
 
[15,713 views]  

A workaround for the 8gb partition limit on Beige G3s | 13 comments | Create New Account
Click here to return to the 'A workaround for the 8gb partition limit on Beige G3s' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Be Careful: A workaround for the 8gb partition limit on Beige G3s
Authored by: Frederico on Apr 05, '04 11:12:06AM

This will work fine until system files are rewritten and optimized and inevitably fall outside of the 8GB mark, when things will start randomly failing or eventually not boot at all. At least this was the case with OS X 10.1, the last time we tried to make >8GB partitions work as boot volumes for OS X. You'll be fine as long as you never store files such as to fill the full 8GB mark, but, eventually, it will likely fail.

Owning and maintaining a substantial number of original '98 (beige) G3s ourselves, most running OS X Server, we are more than content to run the System within an 8GB partition, and move Users, (third party) Applications, Developer and Virtual Memory elsewhere.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Be Careful: A workaround for the 8gb partition limit on Beige G3s
Authored by: Frederico on Apr 05, '04 11:18:22AM

Forgot to mention that also moving Classic and OS 9 Applications elsewhere, as well as trimming language and printer support can trim most OS X installs to ~2GB, as little as 1.2GB for highly trimmed deployments. In such dramatic reductions, one also reduces the need to move VM elsewhere (though I still advise it when a second fast disk is available). This same routine is quite valuable when trying to install OS X on 2GB and 4GB PowerBook drives when one cannot afford or justify purchasing a bigger/faster drive (though, again, for just as little as $40 one can make OS X run substantially better by installing a faster, if not bigger, drive on *any* Mac).



[ Reply to This | # ]
A workaround for the 8gb partition limit on Beige G3s
Authored by: Marcot1 on Apr 05, '04 12:48:35PM

This hint is a really really BAD idea. The 8GB limit on those machines is there for a reason. The only reason this hint works at all is because the OS was laid down within the first 8GB of the disk. Once the system gets optimized a few times files will get moved to other parts of the disk and the machine will not be able to boot.



[ Reply to This | # ]
A workaround for the 8gb partition limit on Beige G3s
Authored by: dmackler on Apr 05, '04 01:47:46PM

This should be okay.

XPostFacto includes the ability to boot of off firewire disks, and large partitions, by installing a small bootloader into another partition, including an OS 9 partition. That bootloader (actually a directory full of stuff) will boot, and then switch to large partition. So it should be perfectly safe.

Ryan (the author) has done some absolutely amazing stuff with these older machines.

David

---
David



[ Reply to This | # ]
A workaround for the 8gb partition limit on Beige G3s
Authored by: Marcot1 on Apr 05, '04 05:30:19PM

Ryan has done some amazing things no doubt, I used some of his early work to install 10.0 on to my Umax S900.

Firewire is a totally different animal then IDE on any machine suffering from the 8GB limit. The limit is imposed by a limitation of the Built-in IDE controller, firewire, SCSI, and PCI IDE controllers are not affected by this bug.



[ Reply to This | # ]
A workaround for the 8gb partition limit on Beige G3s
Authored by: thornrag on Apr 06, '04 09:55:42PM

Perfectly safe it is not. First of all, Ryan's work on "Helper disks" in XPostFacto is intended for booting OS X from otherwise unsupported external FireWire hard disks. His tricks have nothing to do with the 8 GB limitation. In fact, his tricks don't kick in until after the limitation has had its effect. I'll explain.

The issue is with the way an OS X system boots, which is not unlike the way a FreeBSD system boots. First, Open Firmware and hardware on the logic board run a small bit of code at the very beginning of a hard disk's writable area. That code then launches another small bit of code, slightly larger than the first, but also near the start of the hard disk, which is able to find the operating system kernel on the hard drive and start it running as well. Once the kernel is running, the computer starts on up.

The problems arise when the OS kernel is not within the space on the hard disk that Open Firmware can access on its own. The size of this space is limited essentially by how high Open Firmware can count, which is limited by the hardware Open Firmware is running on. If Open Firmware can't count high enough to find the kernel, the boot fails.

Sure, when the OS is loaded, the operating system's high-level drivers can gain full access to hard disks of size limited only by the ATA bus itself. That's why things seem to work if you shovel an oversize partition into a Beige G3, provided of course you're lucky enough to have the kernel close enough to the start of the disk that OF can find it. But until the OS is loaded, Open Firmware is on its own.

As for OS 9, the boot process is slightly different, which accounts for its success with larger partitions. Parts of what would be OS 9's kernel are stored in the ROM on the motherboard, so the system can actually get up and running well enough to find the operating system and load the higher-level drivers for the disk without the size of the partition becoming an issue. On the most recent machines, of course, Apple has finally eliminated this ROM support from the motherboard... which means, sadly, no more booting OS 9. The good news is, these newer motherboards can boot from virtually any size partition.

As for XPostFacto, the boot process is almost literally jumping through hoops. He has basically customized a version of the Mac OS X kernel to load and immediately re-load another kernel stored on an external volume. His kernel has support for external devices that the on-board hardware doesn't have. The boot process then goes like this: 1. Firmware loads boot sector code. 2. Boot sector code loads boot sector code part II. 3. Boot sector code II loads Ryan's custom kernel, which loads support for external disks. 4. Ryan's kernel finds the *real* kernel on the external disk and boots up OS X from there. So as you can see, the 8 GB limitation *still* applies, because the process may still fail before the boot sector code can load even Ryan's kernel.

In the end, you may get lucky. But this is all a terrible idea. At best, you may find yourself unable to boot your machine when your massive research project needs to be printed out and turned in. At worst, you'll find yourself facing serious data corruption. So resist the temptation and install on an < 8 GB partition.



[ Reply to This | # ]
A workaround for the 8gb partition limit on Beige G3s
Authored by: mfulghum on Apr 08, '04 06:28:28PM

It _is_ perfectly safe if your so called "helper" is completely within the 8GB limit. as a matter of fact, the only thing I'd change about what this guy is doing is to create partition one as 7500 Meg, do a complete install of OS 9 and Panther to it, CCC it to the 112 GB partition two, and then tell XPF to boot P2 using P1 as a helper. as long as the kernel and support files are on partition one in the hidden "helper" directory, this works just fine.



[ Reply to This | # ]
A workaround for the 8gb partition limit on Beige G3s
Authored by: baokhangnn on Apr 06, '04 11:14:27AM

OK Guys,

Here's some clarification,
How come I can install OS9 onto a 120 GB partition on a Beige G3 but not OSX? I don't believe that it's the onboard IDE controller issue! Maybe on the first generation G3's, but these were all orginally 300mhz and a few 266mhz machines. So far I have about 12GB of data on the drive and just did the security updater to 10.3.3 and everything is working great! These machine run 24/7 and people use them day-in/day-out! Else they are running Seti @ Home!

One of the students in our lab, is currently writting his doctorate dissertation using Word, Keynote, Matlab, Excel, iCal, Address Book, iSync, iTunes, .Mac, iPhoto, Safari, Sherlock, Endnote, JMP, Photoshop, Desktop Manager, and Weather POP at the same time and has had no problems what so ever! The local harddrive has well over 8GB of data on it and has NO PROBLEMS! (His home directory exist on a server somewhere else.)

Anyways hope this helps!

PS, the new version of Xpostfacto 3.0.a16 now has working drivers for Beige G3's!!!!! No need for PCI video cards!!!! Just tried it and works great! Though not as fast as a Radeon 7000! Duh!



[ Reply to This | # ]
A workaround for the 8gb partition limit on Beige G3s
Authored by: Marcot1 on Apr 06, '04 08:58:06PM

OS9 suffer from the same issue as OSX. OSX installer is just smart enough to tell/forbid you from installing outside the first 8GB. Essentially OS9 is doing the something as this hint. If by any means OS9 ends up outside the first 8GB it will fail as OSX would.



[ Reply to This | # ]
A workaround for the 8gb partition limit on Beige G3s
Authored by: BMarsh on Apr 06, '04 11:12:23PM

I can verify this other users comment. While OS 9 will install on a drive larger then 8 GB in a beige G3, if the OS ends up outside of that 8 GB, it will and does fail to load.

Apple put this limitation into the Mac OS X installer partically because drives got this big around this time (it also effects the first generation tray-loading iMac's with speeds from 233 to 333 Mhz)

It is a limitation of the IDE controller, not anything to do with software
(get a bootable ATA card, and you will get around this limit)



[ Reply to This | # ]
A workaround for the 8gb partition limit on Beige G3s
Authored by: petekjohnson on Apr 10, '04 08:51:15PM

Something I don't understand about using XPostFacto... perhaps somebody can explain it to me. The Mac OS 10.3 installer CD won't actually BOOT on a Beige G3. So how does one actually reach a point where they can install it without doing what the original poster did, which was pull the drive and stick it in another machine? I only have my machine, and I keep trying XPostFacto according to the directions, but since I can't actually get the installer to come up in the first place, I pretty much get nowhere.

Thanks,
Pete
pete_johnson@mac.com



[ Reply to This | # ]
A workaround for the 8gb partition limit on Beige G3s
Authored by: dave_williams on Apr 06, '04 11:58:12AM

A general solution to the 8Gb limit for unsupported desktop machines is to put an ATA drive controller card into a PCI slot, and install OS X on an ATA drive. This completely bypasses the 8Gb limit. Works fine on a 7600 (plus Sonnet 400Mhz G3), which runs with two unpartitioned 120Gb ATA drives and no SCSI drive. It isn't running 10.3, but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't if Ryan has done his usual magic with XPostFacto.

Cards cost from less than $100. Look at OWC's site at <http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Page.cfm?Parent=96&Title=SCSI%20%26%20IDE%20Controllers&Template=>

Also opens up the possibility of hardware RAID to speed things up...


Dave Williams



[ Reply to This | # ]
A workaround for the 8gb partition limit on Beige G3s
Authored by: jkane on Apr 07, '04 12:04:43PM
The safest way is currently to make your 8GB partion the default, then modify the fstab file to mount the bulk of your files from larger separate partitions. See the hint at: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20021011053443661 for details. There really should be a concerted effort to get Apple to support (or at least respect) mount points in future versions of OSX. This is such a basic feature of every other version of *nix out there. Any ideas on how to acomplish this?

[ Reply to This | # ]