Print

[n8tehadventurer]

Hello everyone!  I found this website while looking for why I couldn't get OS9 to install on my Quicksilver 2001 mac.  I have had a few macs since roughly 2012, but I know very little about the OS and the architecture.  I have a couple of macs, nothing serious, a LCIII+, a Performa 637CD, Performa 6290CD, Beige G3 266, Sawtooth G4 450, Quicksilver 2001 800 DP, and just yesterday, a Mac Mini G4 1.42GHz.  I have always wanted a Mac Mini G4 because I like the compactness and functionality of it for retro games and software.  When I got the machine it was booting OS 9, but it would crash and reboot.  Not understanding or realizing how this wasn't normal (as both my Sawtooth and Quicksilver came with OS 9 as bootable) I formatted the hard drive and installed OS X 10.4.11 thinking I would just install OS 9.2.2 afterwards.  Imagine my surprise when I found that by default the Mac Mini G4 isn't supported in OS 9.  Whoops.  I guess I shouldn't have formatted and installed OS X.  Hindsight is 20/20.  But I am really curious.  I was looking for ways to install OS 9 not realizing yet that the Mac Mini didn't support it and I came across this website.  I thought this would be a great place to learn more about the Macintosh computers that I have.  Oh I almost forgot, I got a G5 yesterday for 30 dollars.  I don't know if it works, but it's one of those ones with the square power plug so I Have to order one.  I know the G5 towers are loud, but I was still curious about one.  But thank you for letting me register and join in here.  I am really interested in learning more.  I did not own a mac growing up, we had PC so this is all new to me.  I hope you all have a great rest of your day!

Nathan

[DrNo7]

Welcome Nathan to the forum !

Fortunately, you will be able to download and burn the OS9 install cd for unsupported minis and get your mini back on track.
Remember that if you want to keep it dual-boot, there are a few things to be careful about (partitioning, formatting, disabling spotlight...) but it should be all explained in the forum

[Bolkonskij]

Welcome Nathan!

As DrNo7 said, download the image and try to install again. I'm on the same Mac Mini model (actually, posting from it right now) and it works great. (had to add a USB sound card for getting sound though)

I hope you can get yours up and running and visiting the forum - there's a lot of knowledge to discover here and while Mac OS 9 is looking like an ugly duckling at first, you can turn it into YOUR personal computer and customize it to your needs. You'll be able to get a deep understanding of how the OS works (unlike with modern OSes) if you keep at it and eventually fall in love, just like we all here :-)

See you around!

[n8tehadventurer]

Thank you for the well wishes!  I did get OS9 up and running on it along with OS X, and I understand that spotlight has to be turned off, and I remember reading this in one of the posts regarding OS9 on the Mac Mini, but now I cannot find it.  I turned off the Spotlight items in the keyboard shortcuts but that obviously isn't everything I need to do.  Also, I found out trying to burn the CD that the CD burning aspect of my mac mini doesn't work anymore.  So if anyone has any suggestions on places to purchase a replacement drive I would be super appreciative.  I know I can go the route of two mechanical drives in the machine, but I really like having an optical drive.  I checked the temps on the mini and they "seem" fine the machine doesn't ramp up the fans unless I try to load something more taxing and the air gets warm but the highest temp reading I got on the exhaust was roughly 101 Fahrenheit.  I don't really know if that is super hot or not, but I have some Aeronaut, Kryonaut, and Hydronaut thermal paste, so I plan to redo the heatsink for the G4 processor today.  Not too concerned with that, I re-apply thermal paste to small dies on semi-regular occasion while fixing old PC motherboards and gpus and all that fun stuff.  I right now I'm on the Quicksilver because I want to burn some CDs for the mac mini and it seems that the Dual Proc 800 is moving faster than the mac mini, so something seems strange, shouldn't the single core 1.42 move faster?  I have 256MB of more ram in the Quicksilver, but that little extra ram shouldn't have a massive impact on the OS speeds, should it?