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[Bolkonskij]

My Mac Mini G4 has two partitions. One houses Mac OS 9.2.2, the second is empty. The idea is to restore an old OS X (Tiger) install to this second one. OSX has been backed up to an external firewire drive previously.

I've searched the forum, but most topics cover restoring OS 9 from an OS X instance. I'd like to do it the other way around :-) - get OS X back by only using OS 9. Any suggestions / experience on how to do it? I noticed Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper don't seem to be available for OS 9, is there a similiar software capable of restoring OS X from an external drive?

[MigMac]

the only experience I have surely is outdated. 20 years ago, I tried to transfer a whole OSX partition (I think that was Panther) from an external FW drive while working on OS9. Result? no way, imposssible to boot. I doubt any piece of OS9 software could do that but I may be wrong.

The systems are so different in terms of structure (not even mentioning invisible files, swap etc...). It's ok to restore OS9 from OSX (you get the B-tree error and tons of DS_store files though) but the other way round ?!

[wove]

I have no idea how to do that from OS 9. Can you use the optical drive to boot the OS X installer and use either Disk Utility or the restore function of the installer to move the OS X install to the desired partition. I am not sure the terminal is available from the OS X installer, but if it is you could also use "dd" to restore a partition.

[aBc]

By jove, I think wove’s got it.

IF you’ve a bootable Tiger partition on a Firewire drive that contains all of the added files you’d like to restore… Boot from that partition on the FW drive and then using Tiger’s disk utility, restore everything from there.

Imagine that the 74.5 GB Hitachi drive in the example below is your Tiger booted FW drive and that your mini’s partition slated for Tiger’s restoration appears below that line and is pre-formatted for Tiger.

Of course if Tiger on your FW drive isn’t bootable. Well, never mind. :'(

[wove]

Even if that OS X partition is not bootable, you can run the installer after cloning the partition pointing to the moved partition and it will reinstall fixing the problems and leave the user and the data intact, so the partition would become bootable, while preserving the user and information.

[Bolkonskij]

I eventually restored it from within Tiger. But I was really curious as to whether OS 9 would be capable (in my ever continuing quest to do as much as possible on / via Mac OS! Guess I can scratch this one off the list, though I dare say bonus points for the idea of simply copying the files and then installing a new Tiger from CD on top of that. Somebody also suggested using Copy II and Shrinkwrap for that ... interesting!

Anyway, thanks to everybody answering, both in the forum and via PN! (don't be afraid to post, this place has become tame :-) )