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[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.

[ssp3]

@indibil, if you want to just backup your various drives, did you know that you can simply copy those drives to your large drive in Finder and they will appear there as folders. You don't need bootable partitions for that. Contents of those folders can be copied back to another drive and it will be bootable.
Remember that we are dealing with OS9 here, where everything is SIMPLE. 

[Jubadub]

@laulandn Never heard of pdisk before... Seems to be an OS-X-only tool (well, *NIX tool), for a moment there I thought we could use it from Mac OS 9, and that got me very curious.

Very powerful tool nonetheless. Maybe could be given a GUI by an enthusiast someday.

[indibil]

Thank you all for the suggestions, I'll try this weekend, because I have another project in hand during the week and I don't have time.

I know that saving it in folders is possible, but what I'm doing is making partitions on a FW disk, so that, if something happens on one of my Macs, I connect the FW disk and select its backup, boot and restore (booting from OPTION key). If they're all in folders it doesn't work for me. Or does it?

I usually format and partition in OS9 to avoid problems with OS9 drivers, and I think that since Sorbet Leopard you can't add OS9 drivers anymore, they were previous versions of OSx, and I only use Sorbet, as an accessory. If a Mac can't run OS7/8/9 I'm not interested, hehe.

[Jubadub]

I usually format and partition in OS9 to avoid problems with OS9 drivers, and I think that since Sorbet Leopard you can't add OS9 drivers anymore, they were previous versions of OSx, and I only use Sorbet, as an accessory. If a Mac can't run OS7/8/9 I'm not interested, hehe.

Sorbet or not, diskutil should have the OS9drivers setting. Disk Utility should too via a checkbox if you are formatting an external device. (Or internal device if it "thinks" the device can boot Mac OS 9.)

Sorbet is not a special OS, it's just a generic Leopard install with some scripts and other typical Leopard tinkering. (It captivated a lot of people with its "marketing", though, very successfully at that.)

[Knezzen]

Sorbet or not, diskutil should have the OS9drivers setting. Disk Utility should too via a checkbox if you are formatting an external device. (Or internal device if it "thinks" the device can boot Mac OS 9.)

That setting is only avaliable on machines that support Mac OS 9 officially.

[joevt]

The setting exists in Mac OS X 10.5.8 on Quad G5 or Intel Mac for hard drives in external FireWire enclosure or disk image.

[Jubadub]

@Knez Like @joevt mentions, you can use it from the Quad G5, or even DLSD PowerBook, which don't boot into Mac OS 9. I know I used the Quad way back. Wasn't sure about doing it from Intel OS X, but I'm not surprised to hear it's also possible. (Is it still possible on ARM ones?)

[ssp3]

I know that saving it in folders is possible, but what I'm doing is making partitions on a FW disk, so that, if something happens on one of my Macs, I connect the FW disk and select its backup, boot and restore (booting from OPTION key).

I think you're unnecessarily overcomplicating things.
Unless you are on a very tight budget and/or you are making backups to a rotating 3.5" drive or you have a very tidy workplace with one nice FW box sitting nearby your computer, nothing speaks against removing the lid of your FW enclosure and using several SSD drives in almost a hot-swap fashion.
Small, used brand name SSD drives are cheap these days. Using several drives also reduces the risk of losing data.

With the exception of few specific boxes, I personally have always operated all my other SCSI, FW and TB enclosures 'naked'. Starting from day one.

[joevt]

@Knez Like @joevt mentions, you can use it from the Quad G5, or even DLSD PowerBook, which don't boot into Mac OS 9. I know I used the Quad way back. Wasn't sure about doing it from Intel OS X, but I'm not surprised to hear it's also possible. (Is it still possible on ARM ones?)

The setting is removed from later versions of Mac OS X. Would be nice to know where the OS 9 drivers are in Mac OS X.

[joevt]

The drivers are here:

Code: [Select]

/Volumes/*/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MediaKit.framework/Versions/A/*/MKDrivers.bundle/Contents/Resources
Where the second * is Resources (for Tiger to Snow Leopard) or Loaders (Lion to High Sierra).

The hdiutil layouts are here:

Code: [Select]

/Volumes/*/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MediaKit.framework/Versions/A/*/MKDrivers.bundle/Contents/Resources/defaults.plist

It looks like High Sierra might be the last version of hdiutil to be able to create a "UNIVERSAL HD" layout that has Mac OS 9 drivers.

Disk Utility.app is a different matter. I think only Tiger and Leopard have the "Install Mac OS 9 Drivers" button.

Code: [Select]

grep -l -R "Install Mac OS 9 Drivers" /Volumes/*/Applications/Utilities/Disk\ Utility.app

In Leopard, I have to manually fix the DDM (Driver Descriptor Map) that hdiutil neglects to setup:

Code: [Select]

# Fix Driver Map for disk images created by hdiutil create -layout "UNIVERSAL HD" in Leopard 10.5.8

for thediskimg in \
~/"Disks/Empty.dmg" \
; do
echo "$thediskimg"
dd if="$thediskimg" bs=1 skip=0x10 count=34 2> /dev/null | xxd -p -c 34
xxd -p -r <<< '0004 0000 0040 0017 0001 0000 0078 0024 ffff 0000 00b0 0015 0701 0000 00e8 0022 f8ff' | \
dd if=/dev/stdin of="$thediskimg" oseek=0x10 bs=1 conv=notrunc 2> /dev/null
dd if="$thediskimg" bs=1 skip=0x10 count=34 2> /dev/null | xxd -p -c 34
done