Hello!
I found this site after an internet friend sent me two hand-me-down Mac laptops for cost of shipping because she wasn't a Mac person and my Macbook had just been diagnosed with an ailing logic board. One of the two was a roughly-2008 Macbook Pro on which I am typing this post now. The other—and now we come to it—was a Powerbook G4 (model "5,1"—whatever that means—and circa 2004 I believe) which came to me running Tiger.
Naturally, the first thing I did with the G4 was try to get Classic mode up and running. My family's been using Macs since I was about four (we started with a Performa 630CD—which I still own and which
still works!), and back in my teens I got really good at poking around with the classic Mac OS until it was just as I wanted it. So I stuck my old Mac OS 9 install CD in, as the machine had arrived sans Classic mode, and tried to install.
Well, it turns out that your average installer for the classic Mac OS… will only run under the classic Mac OS. It also turns out that you can't launch Classic from a system folder on a read-only CD… or copy that folder to a hard drive and launch it that way, apparently.
eBay was not forthcoming with model-specific disks (and my friend never had disks to begin with), so I started doing extensive research and ended up here, specifically at the "Mac OS 9.2.2 Install for Unsupported G4s" page. I thought, well, that IS pretty much what I have, so I downloaded the image, burned a CD…
…and lo and behold, booted the G4 into Mac OS 9. Wiped the drive, installed the OS, rebooted a few times to get the danged disk to eject
, and I am now very happily running Mac OS 9! I'm just going to keep it that way and not bother installing Tiger again. The only snags I've run into are 1) the system complains about "missing software" if I try to put it in sleep mode (I did some more research and I guess this is a side effect of not having machine-specific disks), 2) I get an error on every startup about a USB device with missing software even when nothing's connected, and 3) a couple of hardware snags that cropped up even under OS X—there doesn't seem to be an Airport card, so no internet, and sound is weirdly intermittent even with headphones. I might try and fix #3 at some point, but hey, almost-free machine and it's still highly awesome.
In the meantime, I am happily installing all my favorite 1990s-era software and reacquainting myself with Hypercard. I made an account so I could say thank you and maybe chat with other old-Mac nerds.