Mac OS 9 Lives
Mac OS 9 Discussion => Mac OS 9, Hacks & Upgrades => Topic started by: ceratophyllum on September 30, 2026, 07:34:38 AM
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I recently bought an "iBook G4 14 inch for parts" off eBay that turned out to actually be an iBook G3 12" 900MHz with 640MB RAM. I was initially annoyed, but then decided not to complain as it seems to work perfectly and was $25 shipped. Especially since this mac natively boots OS9, no open firmware skullduggery required....
The only bad thing is my 14" iBook still needs a new keyboard.
So anyway, the G3 had Tiger installed on one huge 40GB partition and I wondered what would happen if I just throw the "System Folder", "Applications (Mac OS 9)", and everything else from the restore disk image in the Generic installer CD on the same partition as Tiger. (OS X calls its system folder "System" so nothing gets overwritten.) The OS9 System folder appeared in the Startup Disk OS X control panel, I picked it and restarted...And everything seems fine. Played some games, did some retro IE 5 browsing, all good. (I disable all the Airport crap and use a Raspberry Pi 3 as an ethernet-to-wifi bridge with all my old macs.) So why bother to repartition?