Install OS9 on PowerBook G4 1.0 Ghz 17" - no CD, no 10.4, only Intels around..

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Bought a beaten-up PowerBook G4 A1013 recently.

Actually, you, guys, made me to do it.    My workhorse audio G4 DA is in storage miles away and hasn't been powered since 2015. Since I was checking various apps/plugins etc. in emulation in either SheepShaver or under Rosetta, I thought, why not, why not try everything on a real G4 machine.

Anyway, long story short, the poor PowerBook has all possible problems (more in other topic), but, most importantly, it doesn't have a CD/DVD drive.
It came with 10.5.8 installed, so, there is no way to install OS9 drivers. And I only have Intel machines around.

Not willing to start installing 10.4 or fiddling with external USB DVD drive or wasting/burning CD blanks, this is what I came up with.

Remember - you heard it here first!

1. I used the brilliant (and free) tool called iBored by Thomas Tempelmann https://apps.tempel.org/iBored/
with which I was already familiar from my research on WD MyBook encrypted FireWire enclosures / firmwares.

(Btw, he has PPC version too, as well as versions for dark side and penguins.
It is also absolutely necessary to read everything he has written about apps functionality before doing anything. If you're a novice user, you can easily damage your valuable data by mistake).

2. Then I took generic USB to SATA adapter, took one of my 120GB SSD drives and connected this combo to my MBP running 10.6.8. (In another test I also tried 10.10.5).

This is how the drive looked in iBored initially.



3. In next step one has to make the disk writable.




4. Then choose "Write File to Blocks" from the menu.




5. Navigate to the bootable OS9 installer ISO image file and choose it. Remember - image FILE (!), not mounted image.




6. The app will automatcally detect the number of blocks etc. Make sure you write the file to the disk starting from block number 0.
iBored doesn't care what kind of data the file contains and it also doesn't care what's on the drive. It simply and brutally clones the file to the drive block by block. And that is the "magic part" 




7. The writing process will start.




Congratulations! You have now created a bootable drive that pretends to be a OS9 Installer CD. All the original drivers, present on CD and CD image, are preserved.

Note! Do not try to be a smartie and partition the drive - it will not work! Use this solution to plant a OS9 seed and then work from there using other install/restore methods.


This is how the newly created OS9 boot drive looks in iBored




In OSX Disk Utility. All the partitions seen as disk2s1 - disk2s7 by Disk Utility are actually OS9 Partition map, SCSI and ATA drivers and driver patches.



And in OSX Finder

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I then plugged the newly created "fake CD" drive into PowerBook's USB port, pressed power button and cmd-opt-shift-delete key combo and it didn't take long until I was greeted with this screen.





Since I was familiar with iBored app, all it took for me was around 5 minutes to get it going. The longest part was restoring OS9 over USB bus - 15 minutes or so.

I didn't try option key in my first attempt, so I can't say whether it could have worked or not.
I didn't try this trick with USB thumb drive at first either, but later I cloned the same ISO image to 32GB USB drive and it also works, is selectable when option key is pressed at startup and is bootable.

FYI. In another experiment I cloned the ISO file to 500GB drive. Although it is seen at startup, when opt key is pressed, OS9 does not boot from it.

In the next step I will be testing various FireWire enclosures and their compatibility with OS9. And, of course, will be trying to repair/restore the poor PowerBook thingy. It deserves it, I think.

Once again, BIG SHOUT OUTS to the people who made booting OS9 on unsopported Macs possible!
I know how much work and countless man-hours it takes.

Thanks, guys!

P.S. This method is somewhat similar to "Monte's method", used back in the day to clone complete SCSI drives with a help of FWB's HTD "device copy" option to overcome corrupted/dissappearing Pace authorizations in boot blocks.

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Ha!    My trick works with other images of bootable CDs and DVDs too!

In about a half an hour I went thru all my Apple Service Diagnostic 2.1.4 - 2.6.3 images to see which ones work with my PB G4. Most of that time was spent waiting for the ASD to boot the PowerBook.

It is important to convert those to uncompressed images using Toast first. Just load the image in Toast and then save it as "__.toast" disk image. They will decompress to about ~650MB from original ~180MB. The last ones in the series are DVD images and decompress to ~1.6GB. After the image is decompressed, simply copy it to external HD drive using "write file to blocks" in iBored.

No polycarbonate wasted.