Another mini 1.5Ghz booting on OS9 but … O_o

[zefrenchtoon]

Hi guys!

I finally switched my mini G4 1.5GHz to OS 9 but my story is a bit weird (to me …).
Close to the mini, I have an old G4 Yikes to restore to OS 9 too and because I had it before I bought the mini, I started to work on it first.
So I bought a 120GB mSATA SSD with a mSATA/PATA adapter to fit it in the Yikes. Initially, I partitioned it in 3 parts like this with OS9 drivers :
1 - OS9 for Yikes
2 - OS9 for mini
3 - OSX

Before installing OS X, I wanted to get a working OS 9 so I started to try to install OS9 …
Long story short, I finally installed OS 9.2.1 + OS 9.2.2 + ATI January 2005 on the OS9 Yikes partition. This was working like a charm with the ATI 9200 I added in the Yikes instead of the Rage128.
I downloaded the Ross mini install ISO v9 few weeks ago.
Then I received my mini … (I bought it mainly to « play » with it with OS9)
Because I don’t have any blank CD, I decide to restore Ross ISO on the « OS X » partition and put the SSD in the mini to restore OS9 from Ross ISO on the « OS9 mini » partition. Once I did it, I restarted the mini but … after a long searching (folder blinking for a quite long time and finally a happy face), OS9 started …  in French !

The thing I didn’t tell you is that I’m french and the OS9 version I installed for the Yikes was a French version …
What I can not explain is that the mini does not want to boot on the « OS9 mini » partition, nor on Ross CD restored on the OS X partition but! OpenFirmware find the hacked ROM from theirs and finally boot on the Yikes OS9 (which does not contains any mini ROM of course).


Apart from that story, I have another mystery to explain … the sourd card …
I know and understand why the internal sound card of the mini is of no use on OS9 so I bought 2 cheap « sound card » on USB on Amazon (why 2 ? because it was cheap, I was 2 différents models and I did not know which one would be work on mini so …).
But I can’t make them working … should I change some USB drivers or something ? If you have an idea … I will share with you some screenshot of System Profiler to explain what I got to work as soon as I can.

[IIO]

while i understand that the mini has trouble finding the right volume to boot from - best advice is always to only have one OS on the internal drive of a mini - it is strange that you successfully booted into the regular OS9, because normally that should hang at some point.

did you eventually did the mini-fication surgery to the wrong system folder?

[darthnVader]

Hi guys!

I finally switched my mini G4 1.5GHz to OS 9 but my story is a bit weird (to me …).
Close to the mini, I have an old G4 Yikes to restore to OS 9 too and because I had it before I bought the mini, I started to work on it first.
So I bought a 120GB mSATA SSD with a mSATA/PATA adapter to fit it in the Yikes. Initially, I partitioned it in 3 parts like this with OS9 drivers :
1 - OS9 for Yikes
2 - OS9 for mini
3 - OSX

Before installing OS X, I wanted to get a working OS 9 so I started to try to install OS9 …
Long story short, I finally installed OS 9.2.1 + OS 9.2.2 + ATI January 2005 on the OS9 Yikes partition. This was working like a charm with the ATI 9200 I added in the Yikes instead of the Rage128.
I downloaded the Ross mini install ISO v9 few weeks ago.
Then I received my mini … (I bought it mainly to « play » with it with OS9)
Because I don’t have any blank CD, I decide to restore Ross ISO on the « OS X » partition and put the SSD in the mini to restore OS9 from Ross ISO on the « OS9 mini » partition. Once I did it, I restarted the mini but … after a long searching (folder blinking for a quite long time and finally a happy face), OS9 started …  in French !

The thing I didn’t tell you is that I’m french and the OS9 version I installed for the Yikes was a French version …
What I can not explain is that the mini does not want to boot on the « OS9 mini » partition, nor on Ross CD restored on the OS X partition but! OpenFirmware find the hacked ROM from theirs and finally boot on the Yikes OS9 (which does not contains any mini ROM of course).


Apart from that story, I have another mystery to explain … the sourd card …
I know and understand why the internal sound card of the mini is of no use on OS9 so I bought 2 cheap « sound card » on USB on Amazon (why 2 ? because it was cheap, I was 2 différents models and I did not know which one would be work on mini so …).
But I can’t make them working … should I change some USB drivers or something ? If you have an idea … I will share with you some screenshot of System Profiler to explain what I got to work as soon as I can.

Your OS 9 Folder on the Mini partition is not blessed, you are booting from the Mac OS ROM for the Mini, but it's finding the OS 9 folder on you Yikes partition is blessed.

[zefrenchtoon]

Damn, my last post died in ashes with the forum upgrade … 

Promise, I will try to rewrite it as soon as possible if I remember all I said   

[zefrenchtoon]

So, long story short …

My mini boots off my french OS9 nicely.
I have the energy saver problem so I will have to disable it.
I did not disable Multiprocessing support … I don't know if I have to do it … Maybe I have some loud fan problem so I will try to check this.
I can confirm that bluetooth is WORKING !!  using a Nintendo keyboard

About bluetooth, the trick is to have an OSX install close to OS9 to pair the BT device then the device will remember the BT card id of the Mini and reconnect under os9. This work only with mouse and keyboard and that's why there is an USB 0 with always a keyboard and a mouse "connected" on it. This is a trick to be able to use special keys at boot. The keyboard/mouse are detected as usb device for OS9 so … it works.  

[brirec]

Booting the Mac OS ROM/ToolBox and booting the actual Mac OS system software are two separate steps. My guess is that OpenFirmware on the Mac mini was able to find the good ROM file that it needs to boot, but the Mac OS 9 nanokernel then had trouble picking a boot partition and ultimately chose the French partition. At this point the ROM file with added Mini support was loaded and that’s really all the Mini needs to boot OS 9.

[darthnVader]

You can load the Mac OS ROM from anywhere in the known universe and it will go looking for a blessed Mac OS 9 System Folder.

So in this case the first blessed System Folder it finds is on you 'Yikes' partition.

[zefrenchtoon]

Thanks for your answers. I understood this behavior by myself since then. Finally, I choose to use the Ross v9 install because of my drivers were a bit older than Ross ones. Also, at least in French version of MacOS, Apple had the very bad idea to translate the init/cdev names so updating drivers was always a nightmare when using English ones.

Now I’m « playing » with usb sound adapters to find one that is ok to replace the Mini disabled one.

My results are in another thread started by someone else.