Mac OS 9 Lives
Mac OS 9 Discussion => Mac OS 9, Hacks & Upgrades => Topic started by: indibil on February 17, 2025, 12:08:53 PM
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Hello, I have a HD where I backup the different OS9 that I have installed on my Macs.
Disk utility allows me to create a maximum of 8 partitions. Is there a way to create more partitions?
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There's a pdisk utility for classic Mac OS. I think it's similar to the pdisk utility in Mac OS X.
Or you could partition using Mac OS X (pdisk, Disk Utility.app or iPartition.app).
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Thanks for responding.
I need to do it under OS9, so that the partitions are bootable.
Is the app called like that, pdisk? I'll look to see if I can find it.
:)
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You can get bootable partitions in Mac OS 9 via Disk Utility in OS X, just need to make sure to use "OS 9 drivers".
You may perhaps find the ability to format more than 8 partitions if you use the command-line interface equivalent of Disk Utility, "diskutil". You specify the number of partitions you want. Try that?
Maybe worth a try, you can also try using Mac OS 9's Drive Setup 2.1 (http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/drive-setup-21) (Apple - 2001), or Silverlining Pro 6.5.9 (https://archive.org/details/la-cie-storage_202401) (LaCie - 2007). That particular version of the LaCie one isn't in the Garden yet, but I plan to address that later this week. I don't know if either will support more than 8 partitions, though, but there is a good chance it might.
LaCie's is in fact the only one that I know to be able to adjust cluster size (!), and I think it also offers RAID 0 as an option (for ambitious MDD owners out there, you can e.g. get 8 256 GB SSDs to create a single, 8x faster, 2 TB partition).
Personally, though, since anything other than Mac OS is junk to me, and also because bloat is a problem, I recently just fully switched to 2 partitions: "System" (OS-bound files) and "Files" (anything "portable", which is almost everything). If Mac OS 9 could boot from bigger-than-190GB partitions, a single partition would be all you need, although it is advantageous to have 2 partitions regardless, due to a few reasons.
Anyway, good luck!
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I wanted to check you can have more than 8, but articles like this one claim you can have up to 21:
https://lowendmac.com/2014/how-big-a-drive-does-mac-os-9-support/
Note that pdisk is a bit of an odd application. It was intended for creating Linux partitions, and works via a pseudo command line, so is not "user friendly" and doesn't have a traditional gui. It is very powerful, and will let you manually edit the partition table at a very low level, including creating configurations that won't actually work. It is a MacOS version of the utility with the same name for M68k/PPC Linux/Unix, so guides to using it for those OS's work the same with the MacOS version. I've used it extensively for setting up Linux on m68k/ppc macs.
https://man.cx/pdisk(8)
https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/pdisk
https://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/mklinux.apple.com/DR3/MacOS_Utilities/pdisk.html
From the last link above: "This is an awful Mac OS application, it should be rewritten to look the way a Mac OS app should look. The code assumes a better understanding of the partitioning scheme than most people care to acquire"
I'm having trouble finding a place where you can actually download it, separate from Mac Linux, and after reading all the above, am hesitant to recommend it, at all. Try ALL the other apps that Jubadub suggested first! Only use it if nothing else will let you get the configuration you are looking for.
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@indibil, if you want to just backup your various drives, did you know that you can simply copy those drives to your large drive in Finder and they will appear there as folders. You don't need bootable partitions for that. Contents of those folders can be copied back to another drive and it will be bootable.
Remember that we are dealing with OS9 here, where everything is SIMPLE. :)
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@laulandn Never heard of pdisk before... Seems to be an OS-X-only tool (well, *NIX tool), for a moment there I thought we could use it from Mac OS 9, and that got me very curious.
Very powerful tool nonetheless. Maybe could be given a GUI by an enthusiast someday.
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Thank you all for the suggestions, I'll try this weekend, because I have another project in hand during the week and I don't have time.
I know that saving it in folders is possible, but what I'm doing is making partitions on a FW disk, so that, if something happens on one of my Macs, I connect the FW disk and select its backup, boot and restore (booting from OPTION key). If they're all in folders it doesn't work for me. Or does it?
I usually format and partition in OS9 to avoid problems with OS9 drivers, and I think that since Sorbet Leopard you can't add OS9 drivers anymore, they were previous versions of OSx, and I only use Sorbet, as an accessory. If a Mac can't run OS7/8/9 I'm not interested, hehe.
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I usually format and partition in OS9 to avoid problems with OS9 drivers, and I think that since Sorbet Leopard you can't add OS9 drivers anymore, they were previous versions of OSx, and I only use Sorbet, as an accessory. If a Mac can't run OS7/8/9 I'm not interested, hehe.
Sorbet or not, diskutil should have the OS9drivers setting. Disk Utility should too via a checkbox if you are formatting an external device. (Or internal device if it "thinks" the device can boot Mac OS 9.)
Sorbet is not a special OS, it's just a generic Leopard install with some scripts and other typical Leopard tinkering. (It captivated a lot of people with its "marketing", though, very successfully at that.)
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Sorbet or not, diskutil should have the OS9drivers setting. Disk Utility should too via a checkbox if you are formatting an external device. (Or internal device if it "thinks" the device can boot Mac OS 9.)
That setting is only avaliable on machines that support Mac OS 9 officially.
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The setting exists in Mac OS X 10.5.8 on Quad G5 or Intel Mac for hard drives in external FireWire enclosure or disk image.
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@Knez Like @joevt mentions, you can use it from the Quad G5, or even DLSD PowerBook, which don't boot into Mac OS 9. I know I used the Quad way back. Wasn't sure about doing it from Intel OS X, but I'm not surprised to hear it's also possible. (Is it still possible on ARM ones?)
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I know that saving it in folders is possible, but what I'm doing is making partitions on a FW disk, so that, if something happens on one of my Macs, I connect the FW disk and select its backup, boot and restore (booting from OPTION key).
I think you're unnecessarily overcomplicating things.
Unless you are on a very tight budget and/or you are making backups to a rotating 3.5" drive or you have a very tidy workplace with one nice FW box sitting nearby your computer, nothing speaks against removing the lid of your FW enclosure and using several SSD drives in almost a hot-swap fashion.
Small, used brand name SSD drives are cheap these days. Using several drives also reduces the risk of losing data.
With the exception of few specific boxes, I personally have always operated all my other SCSI, FW and TB enclosures 'naked'. Starting from day one.
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@Knez Like @joevt mentions, you can use it from the Quad G5, or even DLSD PowerBook, which don't boot into Mac OS 9. I know I used the Quad way back. Wasn't sure about doing it from Intel OS X, but I'm not surprised to hear it's also possible. (Is it still possible on ARM ones?)
The setting is removed from later versions of Mac OS X. Would be nice to know where the OS 9 drivers are in Mac OS X.
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The drivers are here:
/Volumes/*/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MediaKit.framework/Versions/A/*/MKDrivers.bundle/Contents/Resources
Where the second * is Resources (for Tiger to Snow Leopard) or Loaders (Lion to High Sierra).
The hdiutil layouts are here:
/Volumes/*/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MediaKit.framework/Versions/A/*/MKDrivers.bundle/Contents/Resources/defaults.plist
It looks like High Sierra might be the last version of hdiutil to be able to create a "UNIVERSAL HD" layout that has Mac OS 9 drivers.
Disk Utility.app is a different matter. I think only Tiger and Leopard have the "Install Mac OS 9 Drivers" button.
grep -l -R "Install Mac OS 9 Drivers" /Volumes/*/Applications/Utilities/Disk\ Utility.app
In Leopard, I have to manually fix the DDM (Driver Descriptor Map) that hdiutil neglects to setup:
# Fix Driver Map for disk images created by hdiutil create -layout "UNIVERSAL HD" in Leopard 10.5.8
for thediskimg in \
~/"Disks/Empty.dmg" \
; do
echo "$thediskimg"
dd if="$thediskimg" bs=1 skip=0x10 count=34 2> /dev/null | xxd -p -c 34
xxd -p -r <<< '0004 0000 0040 0017 0001 0000 0078 0024 ffff 0000 00b0 0015 0701 0000 00e8 0022 f8ff' | \
dd if=/dev/stdin of="$thediskimg" oseek=0x10 bs=1 conv=notrunc 2> /dev/null
dd if="$thediskimg" bs=1 skip=0x10 count=34 2> /dev/null | xxd -p -c 34
done
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I wanted to check you can have more than 8, but articles like this one claim you can have up to 21:
interesting enough that we do not know for sure what the theoretical or practical limit of partitions per drive is, but that "21" probably is nothing more than a recommendation.
because OS9 will automount only 24 or 25 volumes after booting, it would not make much sense to have more than 21 or 22 volumes on your/any startup disk(s) (because you probably want to automount an USB stick, an external drive, a network volume and a RAM disk in addition)
on my main mac i had 7&4 on the main bus for 15 years, but recently switched to only 5+3
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Actually 21 MIGHT be a hard number. With many "retro" systems, they only read a certain number of blocks in their boot code, and that might be all that fit into however many blocks the Mac ROM reads. "24" sounds like something that'd fit like "(blocksize/size_of_partition_entry)*number_of_blocks"
The 21 is likely because the partition table itself takes up an entry. As do "drivers", and if there is one for m68k and one for PPC: 24-3=21
These are just guessing (slash half remembering) and looking up in Inside Mac or elsewhere should show.
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that´s a good guess, too!
we do not trust third party sites though. ;)
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You were right, Sorbet Leopard allows me to create 16 partitions on a 1TB FW disk, and add the OS9 drivers.
THANK YOU!
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The setting exists in Mac OS X 10.5.8 on Quad G5 or Intel Mac for hard drives in external FireWire enclosure or disk image.
that is interesting, because i do not have it in 10.5.x on a quicksilver, only in 10.4.x
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that is interesting, because i do not have it in 10.5.x on a quicksilver, only in 10.4.x
Did you have an external FireWire drive selected in both cases?
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The setting exists in Mac OS X 10.5.8 on Quad G5 or Intel Mac for hard drives in external FireWire enclosure or disk image.
that is interesting, because i do not have it in 10.5.x on a quicksilver, only in 10.4.x
It only appears if you select Apple partition map in the OPTIONS button. If it is in GUID or MBR it does not appear
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I recently learned about the Anubis utility, which allows you to create many partitions even on the oldest OS.
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Nice find! :)
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Interesting find.
Does this work well with external Firewire drives too.
And do all partitions appear and mount with OS 9?
(Especially with an external FW drive?)
I’ve no time to test, but here’s another (later) version available:
https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/anubis-plus-v352 (https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/anubis-plus-v352)
Anyone care to test & report results from any external & FW drive. ;)
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I recently learned about the Anubis utility, which allows you to create many partitions even on the oldest OS.
IIRC, the problem with 3rd party formatters was that they all installed their own drivers, which not always were up to date in regard to latest technologies or OSes.
I only used Apple or FWB, the latter being preferred, since they always were at the forefront.
EDIT. According to their v4 manual, FWB Hard Disk Toolkit can create up to 20 partitions! Not sure if that applies to FW devices, though.
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My fork of DingusPPC can append any number of disks as additional partitions (this is different than Sheep Shaver's method of adding disks). I think Infinite Mac has the feature for its DingusPPC based machines but it might not be on the website yet. If you can get it to boot, then you can see how many partitions each OS version will mount. For system 7.5.5 and Mac OS 8.1, the number is like 16 or 18. I think it can boot 9.1 and 10.0 and 10.1 and 10.2 (using DPPC Beige G3). The virtual hard disk that is created includes the Mac OS 9 driver partitions that you get from 10.5.8 Disk Utility (8 partitions).
I don't know why the limit is 16 or 18. vRefNum is a 16 bit number. Drive numbers have positive values. volume reference numbers are negative values. The default volume is 0. "Inside Macintosh: Files" says volume reference numbers are small negative integers. What are large negative numbers? I think they are working directory reference numbers but I don't know the ranges of either set.
Possibly Mac OS X doesn't have this mount limit since it doesn't deal with volume reference numbers and working directory reference numbers? I haven't tested it yet.
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As always I swear by Intech HD SpeedTools!
https://www.speedtools2.com/HDInfo.html
It claims to partition every FireWire drive up to 9 partitions (in FAT32) usable wth Macs and PCs. I could not find any information about internal HFS+ volumes so I guess it is just about the limit of the Apple Partition Map, which means 62 data partitions. Or perhaps the above discussed number of 21 "auto mount" partitions.
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The standard Apple Partition Map is 64 blocks (including block0). Partition 1 in block 1 specifies the partition map size (63 blocks starting from block 1). Each partition specifies the number of used partitions. Therefore, there's no reason a partition map cannot contain hundreds of partitions. DingusPPC will let you append as many partitions as you like but 2 TB is the max size of the disk before I would need to add code to double the block size from 512 (to 1024 for 4 TB, 2048 for 8 TB, etc.) which might not be honoured by some Apple Partition Map interpreters?
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DingusPPC will let you append as many partitions as you like but 2 TB is the max size of the disk before I would need to add code to double the block size from 512 (to 1024 for 4 TB, 2048 for 8 TB, etc.) which might not be honoured by some Apple Partition Map interpreters?
Such as the interpreter built into Mac OS 9.2.2, from my experience. Later interpreters such as the one in OS X Tiger and Leopard don't have this issue.
I know the drive size itself is not the issue for Mac OS 9.2.2, as I was able to use a 4TB drive that was formatted with Apple Partition Map configuring it as if it was a whole drive of 2 TB maximum capacity. This allows it to work fine with Mac OS 9.2.2, completely normally, on real hardware (MDD is what I did this with).
Curiously, the OS itself has no issue with, say, 4 TB volumes, at least if it's a network volume, like an AFP volume. The Finder will display the available disk space as some 4 thousand GBs on a window correctly, and do all the I/O just fine.
Do we know where we could patch Mac OS to increase this AFP block size ceiling? I'm not sure if that would be in the Mac OS ROM file, or the System file. Any ideas, @joevt?
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IIRC, the problem with 3rd party formaters was that they all installed their own drivers, which not always were up to date in regard to latest technologies or OSes.
Yes, this is spot on... the big "danger" in using 3rd party drivers (and dynamic drive overlays) is that you can end up in a situation where you desperately need data off a drive and you have to hook it to another mac (without the utilities installed) and... BAM... no mountable volume... which can really suck. FWB was notorious for this, and even various versions of FWB were glitchy with each other.
So basically, the general rule of thumb is...
1) If you are always going to boot from the same volume with 3rd party drivers and 3rd party software installed... everything will be peachy keen (unless you corrupt your boot volume). If you do, you better remember exactly what version of 3rd party stuff you had installed, so you can make another boot drive with the exact software and then you can read your stuff as a non-boot volume.
2) Play it safe and use the Mac OS drive setup only
I use the latter for maximum inter connectivity :)
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Do we know where we could patch Mac OS to increase this AFP block size ceiling? I'm not sure if that would be in the Mac OS ROM file, or the System file. Any ideas, @joevt?
You mean APM block size ceiling?
I don't know where in classic macOS all the Apple Partition Map parsers are located.
The supermario source code might have some clues.
SCSIBoot.a of the old SCSI Manager uses sbBlkSize for reading drivers listed in the Driver Descriptor Map. But it uses block size 512 to read entries from the partition map?
BootItt.c of SCSI Manager 4.3 is simular.
I don't see code in supermario that creates drives/volumes from the partition map entries. Maybe it's in the drivers listed in the Driver Descriptor Map. This and the above is covered in the first paragraph in the "Loading and Initializing a Driver" section of "Chapter 4: SCSI Manager 4.3" of "Inside Macintosh: Devices".
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Even in the 1980s, there were SCSI devices with sector sizes above 512 bytes: the magneto-optical disks. For example, the 650 MB type used 1024 bytes/sector, and the 9.1 GB type used 4096 bytes/sector. Since clearly these devices were supported, even in System 6.x, there is no reason that you couldn't achieve larger block sizes on a hard disk or SSD.
Incidentally, APS Power Tools can create 99 APM partitions.
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"ISO standard magneto-optical disks were first put on the market in 1988 for data recording with a capacity
of 650MB per two-sided 5.25-inch disk. In 1991 the ISO standard singlesided 3.5-inch MO disk with a capacity of 128MB was commercialized also for data recording. The recordable MiniDisc (MD) as well as the premastered MD were put on the digital audio recording market in 1992. The AlGalnP laser with a 680 nm wavelength has been used since
1995 for the advanced double-sided 5.25-inch MO disk with a 2.6 GB capacity and single-sided 3.5-inch MO disk with a 640MB capacity."
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-04143-7_9
1992: DigiDesign ProStore Optical
someday, fingers crossed, i will have such a prostore
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I Just sold a Magneto Optical on fleabay for $130 last week
Fujitsu Magneto Optical Drive MCR3230SS SCSI 2.3 GB, Rare, Awesome Cosmetic Cond
maybe it was too cheap, lol
https://www.ebay.com/itm/135209503638
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That sounds about right. The 2.3 GB GigaMO media is too hard to find IMHO. That drive will use all the prior 3.5" MO media though.
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It only appears if you select Apple partition map in the OPTIONS button. If it is in GUID or MBR it does not appear
why would i select something different for OS9 :)
Did you have an external FireWire drive selected in both cases?
yes of course, it is mostly firewire.
luckily i have two more reasons to have 10.4 and not 10.5 on these machines, otherwise it would be a pity because of formatting disks.
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The 2.3 GB GigaMO media is too hard to find IMHO.
Akai DD1000, Akai DD1500, Genex GX-8000 and Genex GX-8500 used them for recording audio, that's why.
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Do we know where we could patch Mac OS to increase this AFP block size ceiling?
to me it always was a mystery why no application (including the OSX shell) allows you to use values bigger than that set maximum for the block size, and since it is not APM or HFS, it must be the operating systems.
couldnt you try to locate where that happens by debugging what fomatting programs do?
i am longingly awaiting a solution to use huge modern HDs without any restrictions. (that bigger blocks might increase the search time or something like that can probably not be avoided. for archival application this is unproblematic anyway)
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IIRC, the problem with 3rd party formaters was that they all installed their own drivers, which not always were up to date in regard to latest technologies or OSes.
Yes, this is spot on... the big "danger" in using 3rd party drivers (and dynamic drive overlays) is that you can end up in a situation where you desperately need data off a drive and you have to hook it to another mac (without the utilities installed) and... BAM... no mountable volume... which can really suck. FWB was notorious for this, and even various versions of FWB were glitchy with each other.
So basically, the general rule of thumb is...
1) If you are always going to boot from the same volume with 3rd party drivers and 3rd party software installed... everything will be peachy keen (unless you corrupt your boot volume). If you do, you better remember exactly what version of 3rd party stuff you had installed, so you can make another boot drive with the exact software and then you can read your stuff as a non-boot volume.
2) Play it safe and use the Mac OS drive setup only
I use the latter for maximum inter connectivity :)
About those rules of thumb, I generally agree with them.
But I have to say, using Silverlining Pro 6.5.9 (http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/lacie-silverlining-pro) from 2007 (and hopefully will soon try out 6.5.9.1 once that is uploaded (http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/lacie-storage-utilities-2007)), aside from my personal experience being nothing short of fantastic with it, I noticed its volumes were all perfectly detected and mountable in both Mac OS 9 (without its drivers installed nor loaded from the booting Mac OS 9 partition) and OS X (both Tiger and Leopard) for any repair or maintenance purposes.
So... Yeah, Drive Setup 2.1, and 1.9.2 for FireWire drives, are awesome... But Silverlining Pro 6.5.9(.1) is king!
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It’s also possible to partition the drive using gparted in Linux.
I used it because I couldn’t find a way for Disk Utility to respect 4K alignment of partitions on SSDs which is important for write performance and SSD longevity.
It’s simple:
- First erase the disk in OS X and add the OS 9 drivers.
- Then, in your Linux machine, in gparted, delete the partition you created in OS X and partition the drive the way you wanted (don’t remove the 8 very small partitions at the beginning of the disk which are the OS 9 drivers)
- Now boot an OS 9 install disk with the drive back inside your Mac, go to Utilities / Drive Setup
- The new drive should be in the list showing up as <not mounted>, select it, go to the Functions menu and choose Update Drivers.
- Reboot, the partitions should show up in OS 9
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Cool! Great info. Never had to do it myself, but I guess there are use cases where 8 partitions are needed.
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It didn't occur to me just how weird a machine one of my Macs is until I was taking a close look at it yesterday when someone had asked about Yellow Dog Linux in another post. I was...pretty sure....I had it installed...and I knew it had a bunch of partitions, but I'd forgotten how crazy many...
I forgot just how insane this system was...but it certainly has more than 8 partitions...and figured you guys might get a kick out of just how crazy a setup is possible on our beloved apples.
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So it began life as a Performa 6360, but I have a Performa 630 motherboard that I swap in and out, so I can easily switch between PowerPC and M68k with the same case, so all the drives, os install, apps, etc.
I love Linux and old machines, so it has THREE distros on it. Debian m68k, MkLinux PPC, and Yellow Dog Linux. The first partition is HFS, under 2g, so I can use it in System 7.6. Then come the MANY linux partitions. Finally, there's a huge HFS+ one that is only usable in System 8.1 and higher.
There are 13 partitions total. Because, of course, I have, for some reason (a backup?), more than one copy of Debian m68k, and there's Linux swap space, and yet another empty Linux partition I'd set aside for who knows what experiment, long forgotten years ago.
I'd originally formatted the drive using whatever came with MacOS 8.1, but then used "pdisk" which is an extremely un-user friendly "command line" style partitioner that came with one of the Linux's. I had to calculate the sizes and placement by hand because it was such an bizarre setup.
So, in total, swapping out motherboards, it runs: System 7.6, MacOS 8.1, three Linux's...and, to top it all off, because that wasn't enough, DOS and Windows 3.1, because the 630 motherboard has the crazy "DOS Compatibility" option installed. (Where you pull out the '040, a huge board fits in the socket, and you put the CPU on that board).
I wouldn't recommend doing this, and obviously didn't do it all at once, but the system evolved over many many years of tinkering.