Mac OS 9 Discussion > Mac OS 9, Hacks & Upgrades
more than 8 partitions on a hard drive.
indibil:
Hello, I have a HD where I backup the different OS9 that I have installed on my Macs.
Disk utility allows me to create a maximum of 8 partitions. Is there a way to create more partitions?
joevt:
There's a pdisk utility for classic Mac OS. I think it's similar to the pdisk utility in Mac OS X.
Or you could partition using Mac OS X (pdisk, Disk Utility.app or iPartition.app).
indibil:
Thanks for responding.
I need to do it under OS9, so that the partitions are bootable.
Is the app called like that, pdisk? I'll look to see if I can find it.
:)
Jubadub:
You can get bootable partitions in Mac OS 9 via Disk Utility in OS X, just need to make sure to use "OS 9 drivers".
You may perhaps find the ability to format more than 8 partitions if you use the command-line interface equivalent of Disk Utility, "diskutil". You specify the number of partitions you want. Try that?
Maybe worth a try, you can also try using Mac OS 9's Drive Setup 2.1 (Apple - 2001), or Silverlining Pro 6.5.9 (LaCie - 2007). That particular version of the LaCie one isn't in the Garden yet, but I plan to address that later this week. I don't know if either will support more than 8 partitions, though, but there is a good chance it might.
LaCie's is in fact the only one that I know to be able to adjust cluster size (!), and I think it also offers RAID 0 as an option (for ambitious MDD owners out there, you can e.g. get 8 256 GB SSDs to create a single, 8x faster, 2 TB partition).
Personally, though, since anything other than Mac OS is junk to me, and also because bloat is a problem, I recently just fully switched to 2 partitions: "System" (OS-bound files) and "Files" (anything "portable", which is almost everything). If Mac OS 9 could boot from bigger-than-190GB partitions, a single partition would be all you need, although it is advantageous to have 2 partitions regardless, due to a few reasons.
Anyway, good luck!
laulandn:
I wanted to check you can have more than 8, but articles like this one claim you can have up to 21:
https://lowendmac.com/2014/how-big-a-drive-does-mac-os-9-support/
Note that pdisk is a bit of an odd application. It was intended for creating Linux partitions, and works via a pseudo command line, so is not "user friendly" and doesn't have a traditional gui. It is very powerful, and will let you manually edit the partition table at a very low level, including creating configurations that won't actually work. It is a MacOS version of the utility with the same name for M68k/PPC Linux/Unix, so guides to using it for those OS's work the same with the MacOS version. I've used it extensively for setting up Linux on m68k/ppc macs.
https://man.cx/pdisk(8)
https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/pdisk
https://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/mklinux.apple.com/DR3/MacOS_Utilities/pdisk.html
From the last link above: "This is an awful Mac OS application, it should be rewritten to look the way a Mac OS app should look. The code assumes a better understanding of the partitioning scheme than most people care to acquire"
I'm having trouble finding a place where you can actually download it, separate from Mac Linux, and after reading all the above, am hesitant to recommend it, at all. Try ALL the other apps that Jubadub suggested first! Only use it if nothing else will let you get the configuration you are looking for.
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