A couple of things…

Some individuals still install OS 9 and OS X on the very same single partition. I often fail to remember this. But this is not the situation here, correct?

You have two partitions on the OWC Electra 3G 500 GB and you’ve installed OS 9 on the first partition? And THAT partition is 190 GB or less? Leaving the remainder for other partition(s)?

If not… then you might try re-partitioning and then re-installing OS 9 on that (now) 190 GB or less partition. [I normally will make such a partition targeted for a bootable OS 9, 120 GB or so. Again, this is something that you might try.]

AND some have reported other such SATA controllers (like the Sonnet) having difficulties with Quicksilvers. So maybe try the above re-partitioning of the 500 GB OWC and only install OS 9 on the first partition to test this scenario. If it works with a smaller size partition for OS 9 — then perhaps you can load up (install) Tiger, etc. on the other partition(s) afterwards.

I make my contribution.

G4 QuickSilver 2001 with PCI SATA Sonnet Tempo Card
OWC Mercury Electra 3G 500GB

- Tiger Boot Flawlessly
- OS9 see the disk but does not boot (tried everything, apple partitioning is on, installed os9 drivers with Disk Utility on Tiger, Blessed the System Folder both with the other running OS9, and with bless command on Tiger, I even switched the cables on the card).

Is not a big deal for me since I use the disk essentially for data, but I am a bit disappointed. probably is an incompatibility between Sonnet Firmware and new OWC drives ? Could you suggest me some legacy drives from OWC that boot (on SATA Sonnet) MAC OS )

I highly suspect that if I put an IDE to SATA adapter that disk would boot nicely on system 9, do you agree ?

cheer,
paolo from Italy

PS
while writing I'm wondering if I wrongly exceeded the size limit for a bootable drive in OS9.
I vaguely remember 190GB limit for drives, 128GB is an hardware limit of ATA66 bus that sould be overridden by SATA adapter, tomorrow I will tried repartitioning

...I really have difficulty navigating this site. My last question (a year or so ago, I think), got some answers. And I could never find them again.

"find them"?

Click on PROFILE, Show Posts and you'll find a listing of all of your posts...

THEN you can click on each individual post to see who might have responded.
 

First of all, I have to say: I really have difficulty navigating this site. My last question (a year or so ago, I think), got some answers. And I could never find them again.
Anyway, two issues, one being somewhat of an emergency.
II have been printing from 9 to my ancient but very good printer, a HP 5100 (prints on 11 X 17 is one of its virtues).
Anyway, all of a sudden I run into an issue I've never seen before, for printing and making PDFS.
I got to print and get the following message:
"the printer description file associated with this printer has caused an error"
followed by the application I'm using, Mosaic, to "unexpectedly quit" with a type 2 error.
I tried a backup drive I have, and it worked fine. I found the PDF files, and other printing related files, and replaced the ones on my startup drive, and that didn't solve the problem. I have no idea what to try next.
Ny other question is: i have a newer model printer also, that I use in X. Is there any way I can get 9 to print using it? It's on my network (ethernet) but doesn't show up.

try a sonnet 1,8ghz upgrade

Yep - something like LinPlug Albino is constantly hitting the limits, even after giving it as much as I can with having 1GB total. 2GB would be fantastic to have for these very specific but frequent circumstances.

Quote from: Tag365 on November 24, 2025, 04:57:25 AM

Hopefully someone gets back to work on the project... I thought after like 7 years they would have figured out how to get 2 GB of RAM usable. Pretty disappointing that the project seemly stopped like that.

Name me ONE OS7-OS9 application that would benefit from having 2GB of RAM available.

Some people from earlier in the thread claimed that music programs use colossal amounts of RAM for sampler instruments.

I just added 256 MB or RAM to my main working computer (a G4 MDD) and I started to do real life test, In this picture we can see Cubase using 1.54 Gb or RAM, (mainly loaded by Kompakt sampler instruments). No problems by now ... 

Putting a feeler out there to see if anybody has what I'm looking for -

I'm on the hunt for the fastest PowerMac G4 that can natively run OS 9. I currently have a 533mhz G4 (Digital Audio) that I'm pushing the limits of in Logic. I'm also looking for a 23" Apple Cinema Display (with the ADC connector) - currently have a 17" that's a little cramped. I've been building a home studio that's centered around OS 9 and am confident in the software enough that I'm ready to upgrade the hardware I'm using.

Long shot but I'm in SE Wisconsin if that helps because I know shipping these is a pain. If nearby, I have an Apple ][e (a few broken keys that need to be glued(?) back on) with an Apple /// screen (and two floppy drives), some Mac Classics, and a massive stack of old ThinkPads to potentially trade haha. I'm not in a rush so if you see this post way down the line, definitely reach out!

Thanks!

Quote from: Tag365 on November 24, 2025, 04:57:25 AM

Hopefully someone gets back to work on the project... I thought after like 7 years they would have figured out how to get 2 GB of RAM usable. Pretty disappointing that the project seemly stopped like that.

Name me ONE OS7-OS9 application that would benefit from having 2GB of RAM available.

NI Kontakt. 

Hello,

I have installed Macos9lives on my eMac G4 and everything was working fine, except I always had to hold the option key to force boot into os9 instead of osX (I have dual boot).

So I decided to use the command bless from osX to set os9 has the boot volume. It worked and it booted to os9 automatically however now I am getting that message (from the post title) and the Apple menu on the left only has “about this computer”, menu is gone.

I’ve tried dragging the finder + system folder on the desktop and putting those back but it didn’t fix the problem.

Have I ruined the system to the point I need to reinstall it?