By the way, has anyone succeeded booting into OS 9 on the Mini, but over FireWire (or even USB) drives? I can install OS 9 files just like I did with the internal HDD I have, and it shows up among the options on OS 9's StartUp Disk and even upon booting with Alt/Option pressed as a boot option, but once it attempts to boot, I get the "diskette with question mark" problem, implying it couldn't find any OS to boot with from there. Some seconds later, it boots from the internal HDD.
Aside from this inability described above, it also causes a little side-effect: if booting into OS 9 afterwards (installed in my internal HDD), all the partitions are missing from my external FW HDD, meaning the drive goes entirely undetected, and even upon rebooting with Alt/Option pressed, those partitions are all still missing. The problem is resolved when I boot into my internal HDD's OS X partition, which immediately "sees" the external HDD once again, and its partitions.
For reference, when all of the external FW HDD's partitions are visible and accessible once again, I can boot OS X 10.4/5 Client/Server off them without any problem whatsoever.
In short:
1. How to boot OS 9 off FireWire drives on the mini?
2. Why does the external FW drive "disappear", and why OS X "finds them back" while OS 9 does not?
In case anyone can answer these... I believe external, bootable OS 9 besides optical medium would be very desirable.
I didn't try booting things from OF, although I'm not sure if that would make a difference for OS 9.
EDIT: And oh, also:
- All partitions were formatted over OS X's Disk Utility. The Drive Setup that came with the OS 9 mini CD couldn't support the FW drive at all;
- The partition I tried to get OS 9 to work with was formatted with HFS+ (without journaling, case-INsensitive. Meaning plain, old, default HFS+).