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[NigelNowhere]

I have a a 1.25 ghz Mac Mini G4 with 1gb ram arriving tomorrow. It has 10.4 as a clean I stall on what I believe to be a 100gb HD. I am wondering if I need to partition the drive and have an install of os 9 alone on its own partition or if I should leave the drive as is and install Mac OS 9 alongside OS X. It seems that back in the public beta days of OS X i had a joint install on my G4 tower. However I can’t remember if I partitioned the drive or not. Also if I do partition the drive, could I have classic boot the Os 9 install from the second partition? I would think that would work pretty easily. Thanks in advance for the help.

[Protools5LEGuy]

I think the easiest is to partition it on Mac OS 9 with other machine using Target Disk Mode via firewire cable. In that way you are sure it contains the Partition blessed/It has Mac os 9 disk drivers. But honestly I am an ignorant about the new methods to install it on a Mini.

I talk from my experience installing a GHz 17" Powerbook

...................................

Added later
Leopard doesnt have the option to OS9 drivers

Tiger and Panther had it also so you could partition from a Mac OS 9 to Tiger machine in Apple Partition Map With Mac OS 9 disk drivers

[Knezzen]

Highjacking this thread since I'm trying to do the same thing. I have been dual booting Mac OS 9 and OSX from the same partition since the Jaguar days and never had any issues with that setup. Trying to resurrect my Mini G4 after a HD crash I'm trying to do the same thing by using the Mac Mini G4 install disk and then install Tiger on top of it, but OS 9 just wont boot after Tiger is installed.

I can force it using the bless command from Tiger with the "use9" flag set, but all that it gives me is the classic floppy icon with the blinking question mark.

Have anyone gotten this to work on the mini? I can't be the only one preferring this setup over the dual partition one

[wove]

I can confirm @Knezzen's experience. I dual booted OS9 and OSX off a single partition hard drive on machine that natively supported both OSes. I have never been a fan of multiple partitions, perhaps for no logical reason, just personal likes and dislikes. I did make a couple attempts to achieve a single partition setup on my Mini without success and am currently running OS 9 application using the OS X Classic framework. But I would find it very nice to be able to boot into OS 9 directly.

[Knezzen]

I used two partitions before the HD crashed, but it was... Not optimal. Maybe I'll go Mac OS 9 only on it and save OSX for other machines. A bity though, but what to do.

[DieHard]

After 20 years of preaching to the choir... many will eventually stop fighting the dual boot position (on the same drive) and keep OS9 and OSX separated.  They really don't play well together, but in a tower, you can at least go with 2 separate physical drives for a dual boot setup.  In the end, setting up so many variations of G4s and OS versions, I just started separating the OS 8.x to 9.x G4s from the 10.x G4s; It made my life a lot easier

[Knezzen]

Yeah, I'm forced against my will at this point. I've historically had the most trouble dual booting when I let them live on separate partitions (or drives) and had the least amount of issues when I did it as Apple intended and ran them from the same drive.

So i'll partition the damn drive again and just get in line, I guess

[joevt]

Use my dumpvols.sh script to dump the info of your drive.
 https://gist.github.com/joevt/a99e3af71343d8242e0078ab4af39b6c
It will show the blessed OS X and OS 9 folders of each partition.

In Mac OS 9, moving the Finder in and out of the System Folder will bless the System Folder. Which FinderInfo does it affect?

Use the bless command in Mac OS X to set or change or fix them. I think it can change any of them depending on what options you use for the command.

In Open Firmware, \\ is one of the blessed folders and \\\ is the other blessed folder.
For Mac OS 9, the tbxi file is Mac OS ROM in /System Folder.
For Mac OS X, the tbxi file is BootX in /System/Library/CoreServices.

Check the boot-device NVRAM variable in Open Firmware or Mac OS X to see which tbxi file is set to boot. This can be changed using the Startup Disk preferences panel or the bless command or the nvram command.