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[Nehalem501]

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

[Knezzen]

Cool! Great info. Never had to do it myself, but I guess there are use cases where 8 partitions are needed.

[laulandn]

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.

----

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.