Boot without the "Mac OS 9 Drivers"

[vaccinemedia]

Should somebody check what Lacie Silverlining Pro 6.5.8 do, when you choose install OS 9 drivers, it seems that it install it's own drivers that are loaded before OS 9 really boots.

So this was a very good question! I just tried this by doing the following:

Use the Tiger install CD to wipe the drive and create two partitions for OS9 and 10.4
Install 10.4 Tiger
Use disk utility to restore OS9Lives for previously unsupported hardware to the other partition
Reboot using the OS9Lives CD
Use a USB stick with Lacie Silverlining to mount the drive and install Lacie drivers
Reboot
Hold down the alt key and select the OS9 partition / system

The system will not boot though. Please see the photo of the screen showing Silverlining on the bottom right hand corner having loaded but still having the floppy disk icon with the question mark on it.

[vaccinemedia]

Further to my previous post, given a clean system with Silverllining Drivers installed I installed python3 on Tiger using TigerBrew and then patched the ROM using ataboot.py and imported the resources using simplerez and changed the filetype and creator using FileType and rebooted while holding down the alt key and selected the OS9ives partition and got the dreaded floppy disk with the question mark on. So as far as I can conclude, the ataboot.py script does not make a bootable OS9 partition when patching the OS Boot ROM provided by the "previously unsupported G4" installation found here: http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php/topic,2143.0.html

[caver01]

Reading the play-by-play here (which I know has played out over a long period but is now very relevant for me!). I am VERY interested in the progress you are making, though it does seem to have hit a wall.

My situation is a catch-22 with a 1GHz G4 eMac:

This is the SECOND iteration of the 1GHz eMac, so it technically was never a native OS 9 booting machine.

I am stuck because:
1. Trying to setup a big drive with multiple partitions (500GB, and I will be happy with 4 partitions)
2. Want dual-boot 10.4 and OS9
3. If I partition with OS9Lives CD, Disk Setup can only see like 130GB, but it DOES install OS 9 Drivers of course, and once installed OS9 boots fine, shows up holding ALT key etc.
4. Getting OSX setup in additional large partitions is problematic because: Disk Utility CAN partition the whole drive the way I want, BUT
It does NOT give me the option to install OS9 drivers. This is so frustrating because you see that advice all over the internet, “just make sure ‘Install OS 9 Drivers’ option is checked.” Well, the option does not even exist, so I am screwed. I end up with the right partitions, but without the drivers, so. . . OS9 is not going to boot once I put it on a partition.

It seems like my desire is identical to your recent simplified attempts: 10.4 Tiger plus OS 9 on separate partitions without the OS9 Drivers, only I have a G4 eMac.

Maybe I am just not aware of some utility that will let me partition 500GB and install the drivers. I am fine with that, but so far, the only way I can get them is partitioning with OS 9, and then I cannot see the whole drive to partition it.

If there is anything I can try, or you have a shared ROM file you’d like me to drop in, I could. I am not up to speed with the ROM file patching steps above, but I think I was following along OK.

[caver01]

@vaccinemedia I was re-reading your update posts and wondered about the .hqx method you abandoned. Were you at one point getting an output patched ROM file with a .hqx extension?? And if so, what about then converting it to Mac binary format again (un-binhex the file). Shouldn't that result in a single, properly written ROM file?

[vaccinemedia]

@vaccinemedia I was re-reading your update posts and wondered about the .hqx method you abandoned. Were you at one point getting an output patched ROM file with a .hqx extension?? And if so, what about then converting it to Mac binary format again (un-binhex the file). Shouldn't that result in a single, properly written ROM file?

Aaaaaahhhhhh! It's been a while since I used OS9 back in the day. I never recognised the .hqx extension so I never thought about using Stuffit Expander to expand the ROM. Instead I spent way too many hours with the separate files using ResEdit trying to make a full ROM again. Yes I'm assuming what you are suggesting may well work! The thing is... I abandoned the idea and instead decided to leave MorphOS out of the equation. The goal was to have as many operating systems on a brand new 128GB SSD using an IDE to M.2 adapter. Each additional OS install was removing the OS9 Drivers so I left that bit til last and left out MorphOS which was not playing nice with the multiboot setup at all.

I ended up with: OS9 / OS 10.4 (with classic) / OS 10.5 / Debian 12 / Adelie Linux / Lubuntu 16 Remix / OpenBSD 7.4

******** BTW! ********
I nearly forgot! You CAN partition a HD with OS9 drivers installed using a Tiger install CD using the terminal using a command like this:
diskutil partitonDisk /dev/disk0 OS9Drivers HFS+ macos9 35G JHFS+ macosx 35G

The above partitions the first HD with 2x 35GB partitions and installs OS9 drivers

[caver01]

Thanks for the command line example. The more techniques we have the better. I do hope someone might be able to push this "driverless" possibility a little further though, but it won't be me. . . I was able to solve my driver dilemma by starting with MacOS9Lives boot CD, only instead of using the Drive Setup that auto-launches, closing that and mounting the disk image .img file used for the restore. . . that image contains a newer version of Drive Setup in the Utilities folder--one that can see and partition larger drives. That worked for me.

I know have a dual boot OS9 and OSX Tiger, though I do have 4 partitions and was considering trying out Sorbet Leopard.

[vaccinemedia]

Glad you got it working! And I never knew there was a better version of Drive Setup on the disk image so that's something to remember I'm just downloading a copy of Tiger which I'm hoping will work with UTM, the emulator for M1 / M2 etc which is basically a nice front end for Q-EMU. My tiger .dmg will not work but I discovered a .toast version which is said to work. My aim is to emulate things for testing on my M1 MacBook as I don't want to open up my PowerBookG4 again just to insert a blank M2 SSD for testing purposes and so if I can emulate things that's the way to go.

My aim is when it has finished downloading from the Internet Archive (which takes forever) it will let me have a hard disk image which can be partitioned. If so I'm going to use the Tiger CD to partition it with 2 partitions - one for OS9 and one for Tiger - much like you were attempting to do. Then after installing Tiger I'm going to install OS9.2.2 and hopefully get to see a flashing disk with a question mark on it. Then I'll use Tiger to patch the ROM on the OS9 drive as .hqx and use Stuffit expander to expand the new patched ROM and see if OS9 will then boot

[vaccinemedia]

OK - I've just found out that UTM on the Mac does not allow you to boot from a drive with multiple partitions or at least I can't figure it out. I created a G4 Mac99 machine, booted the Tiger DVD and used disk utility to create two partitions: 1 2GB for OS9 and the rest for Tiger. Tiger installed at about the same speed as my PowerBookG4 which was nice. But on reboot it fails at the OpenBIOS stage. It looks like it's because OpenBIOS is expecting only one partition so it tries to boot from disk:,\\:tbxi and not disk:2,\\:tbxi which Tiger is installed on. I'm assuming it's disk:2 anyway as I can't remember if partitions start from 0 or 1

I'd issue the boot command to boot from the Tiger partition but UTM OpenBIOS is not allowing my to type at all. So I'm currently looking to see if UTM actually supports HardDrive files which have more than one partition. I may try with two separate disk images and make sure the OS9 one is formatted by Tiger WITHOUT the OS9 drivers.....

[vaccinemedia]

OK so to answer the question @caver01 I setup a VM as I did not want to mess with my already working 7 OS system and had 2 partitions: 1 2GB for OS9 and 1 10GB one for 10.4 Tiger.

I used the Tiger DVD to format both partitions / drives (I'm using UTM for virtual Macs here) and made sure that "Install OS9 Drivers" was unchecked. Installed Tiger to the 10GB drive and everything was OK. So far so good....

Then I installed OS9Lives to the 2GB drive and made that the primary drive and saw the floppy with a question mark - which is what I was expecting as I had not installed OS9drivers.

I then took a previously patched ROM using the python script "ataboot.py" this thread is about which I used on a real G4 PowerBook running Tiger which was created using the .hqx option. Based on what you mentioned previously I used stuffit expander to expand the file and replaced the ROM file in the system folder with this new one.

I booted and saw the floppy with the question mark.

So I'm at a dead end again. Does this patch even work? Will someone ever show it working with a tutorial video? Only time will tell .....

Glad I didn't open my PowerBookG4 up and spend another £18 on a drive just to find this out! ;P

[vaccinemedia]

I've just double-checked and the original post was not on April the 1st