When I put a new hard drive and motherboard in my blueberry g3 500 I did not have os9 discs, only os 10.2.8 discs. So I installed them and life went on until I could afford a used set of os 9 discs. When they came, I tried to install it from osX. It says it cannot read the HD, and asks me to format it before installing, warning that it will erase the drive. My question is:
Is there a way to install classic os 9 on my os 10.2 machine without losing all my data? Thanks for your time, you guys have been really helpful to a mac apprentice already.
1) Install a small second hard drive, or attach one in a FireWire enclosure. Boot to the OS 9 CD and install OS 9 on the second drive. You can stop here, or proceed to ...
2) Drag-and-drop all the folders from the second drive into your OS X drive. (You might first need to change the name of the "Applications" folder on the OS 9 disc to "Applications (Mac OS 9)" You can wipe the second drive now if you chose to take this step.
You will now have a Mac OS X "System" folder (in addition to "Library," "Users," and "Applications"), and a Mac OS 9 "System Folder" folder (in addition to "Desktop," "Documents," and "Applications (Mac OS 9)"). Both systems will be bootable.
Enjoy!
Are they the generic OS 9 installation disks--white with a big yellow 9? Do you have any other Mac computers and a CD burner?
they are grey disks. I have another g3 400 and an external iomega cd burner.
Grey machine-specific installation CDs for OS 9, unless they are labelled as specific to your machine, may not be adequate. It is of critical but often overlooked importance that the drive on which you install OS 9 have the hard disk drivers specific to OS 9 already installed before the installation begins. Failing this you will not be able to address (or 'see') the drive from any startup volume using OS 9, which includes the OS 9 installation CD.
Machine-specific CDs can do this (and so can OS X write OS 9 drivers to a hard drive from within OS X's Disk Utility application) during the drive's formatting process, but they may not be able to install specific software needed by the host Mac onto its drive. The 'ROM in RAM' of so-called New World architecture means that what software is no longer built into a given Mac's ROM has to be supplied by the install CD. That machine-specific software may simply not be contained on a CD that has been prepared as specific to a different Mac model.
Thus it is that the 'universal' or 'retail' white CDs with an amber '9' are the safest purchase for installation of OS 9. You will, if you intend to use OS 9 within OS X in Classic Mode, need a retail CD of OS 9.2.1, from which you can update to OS 9.2.2 by download and installation. Somewhat more tortuously, you can also start from OS 9.1, and make sequential downloads of and updates with OS 9.2.1 and 9.2.2. As a generality, even for use as a standalone System (by machines with adequate RAM and cpu speed) OS 9.2.2 is also the pick of the pre-OS X Systems for stability and utility.
de
I've wondered if it is possible to use OS 9's Drive Setup to "Update Disk Drivers" to an OS 9 driverless drive? And not fubar the existing X installation? Eh?
dan k
I suspect that your suspicion is well justified. I cannot speak of Apple's drivers, because I don't use them. However, my experience of Silverlining 5.8.3 to 6.5.8 on my own 40+ Macs is that the space (partition) available on a drive for drivers is set only a little in excess of the driver's requirement, and installation of another or a larger driver obligatorily requires recreation of the drive's file system to create the several characteristic Apple partitions, only one of which is the visible data 'volume', which in turn needs removal of all data to preserve them, and so on ...
With Silverlining the size increment between versions means that an upgrade of driver is best done at the time that some other cause for reformatting is also pressing for attention, or when the drive is being prepared for another Mac that needs a different version of the driver. On balance then, I can anticipate terminal difficulty in trying to retrofit OS 9 drivers to a drive with OS X and data already on it.
de
I guess it's also time to point out some work arounds for using machine specific discs on "other" machines. Typically you can use a machine specific OS X install disc on another machine, as long as the CPU lines up ie, older OS X.2 discs won't work in G5s, no PPC disc will work in an Intel, and vica-versa. It is possible to install OS 9 from a machine specific disc by using Pacifist, however that requires an installation of OS X to begin with.
So he installs a basic OS 9 on his other Mac, puts it all in a folder called Classic, burns the folder to a CD, puts the CD in the G3 500, transfers the folder to the X harddrive, et voila? This won't work?
I tried that with a 2gb flash drive. Worked good. Told machine to restart in classic mode, BAM! flashing question face! Had to reinstall os x to even get computer to do anything. Backed up data, and partitioned HD into two 5gb and 1 30gb portions. Installed os 9 on one 5gb X jaguar on another. Both boot fine so far, but still will not open classic in os X. I mean that i can boot to os 9 but not from os X. I then noticed the os9 version i have is 9.0.2. So I have to update it to 9.1 or later right? Is there an easy way to do this (read CHEAP)?
How about free?
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75288
Oops, sorry. I forgot to add that you probably wouldn't be able to boot into 9 with my scheme, but the transferred Classic folder might work just as Classic mode in X. Why do you want to be able to boot into 9? Do you have old apps that won't work in Classic mode in X?
Yep, the free 9.1, 9.2.1, and 9.2.2 updates from Apple are fairly fast and simple. You should have no problems, unless you're on dialup, which would require a lot of time to download them. I don't remember if you have to be able to boot into 9 to install them, or if you can simply install them through Classic mode. I would expect you probably have to boot from 9 to do the updates.
thanks. I found those before you guys replied, but thanks. I am able to report that my system is up and running.
I'm new to the forum and my problem is that I have a mac G4 cube in which I upgraded to a dual 1.5ghz processor. I did update firmware to 4.1.9f in the past. I loaded os 10.4 and recently 10.5
I then decided to go back to os 9. Just purchased a 120GB apple hard drive and installed in my cube but when I put an install cd in. I end up with little happy mac icon and after a few minutes end up with broken folder icon. My question is this due to the processor or is it a firmware problem. Any help would be appreciated.
Well I did some research and it seems to be my powerlogix 1.5ghz dual processor. If I can find a way to lower the 1.5ghz down to say about 500MHz my computer should be able to see and install os 9. But I'm going by a theory on how I used to play old software games by lowering the clock speed. Anyone ever tried this on a mac?
Well I did some research and it seems to be my powerlogix 1.5ghz dual processor. If I can find a way to lower the 1.5ghz down to say about 500MHz my computer should be able to see and install os 9. But I'm going by a theory on how I used to play old software games by lowering the clock speed. Anyone ever tried this on a mac? I guess what I'm asking is there any software programmes that do this.