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[ceratophyllum]

I recently bought an "iBook G4 14 inch for parts" off eBay that turned out to actually be an iBook G3 12" 900MHz with 640MB RAM. I was initially annoyed, but then decided not to complain as it seems to work perfectly and was $25 shipped.  Especially since this mac natively boots OS9, no open firmware skullduggery required....
The only bad thing is my 14" iBook still needs a new keyboard.

So anyway, the G3 had Tiger installed on one huge 40GB partition and I wondered what would happen if I just throw the "System Folder", "Applications (Mac OS 9)", and everything else from the restore disk image in the Generic  installer CD on the same partition as Tiger. (OS X calls its system folder "System" so nothing gets overwritten.)  The OS9 System folder appeared in the Startup Disk OS X control panel, I picked it and restarted...And everything seems fine. Played some games, did some retro IE 5 browsing, all good. (I disable all the Airport crap and use a Raspberry Pi 3 as an ethernet-to-wifi bridge with all my old macs.) So why bother to repartition?

[GaryN]

There are some very important reasons. They have been discussed and cussed about ad infinitum on the forum. if it was up to me, there would be in their own subheading BUT since they're not…

START HERE:  https://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=2830.msg53590#msg53590

[ceratophyllum]

I have some vague recollection that dual booting was a bad idea back in the day, which is why I'm giving it a go on a drive I will probably replace.  It really sounds like it is more trouble than it's worth at least on unsupported hardware.  So Spotlight corrupting the disk is the main issue.... I never liked Spotlight and always disable it: good old fashioned command line locate is blazing fast even on an old spinner and dead simple.

I was considering dual booting Tiger and (unsupported) OS9 for my  ibook G4 12"  Radeon 9550.  I'm pretty sure if I install Tiger first to an empty drive, it will not install Mac os 9 disk drivers so the easy way (just copying the "System Folder" folder to the Tiger drive) is out.   I went and made 2 partitions and installed OS9 on the first, but now I hesitate install Tiger.

I have a 128GB drive with the first 64GB used for OS9 and was thinking of installing Tiger in the second 64GB partition.  Is this likely to demolish my OS9 install?  Has anyone tried this?

[GaryN]

Installing Tiger first is the way to go:

* Use the Tiger installer to first format the drive during which time you will be presented with the checkbox option to "Install OS9 Drivers".
* Then create one partition to yield two volumes - one for each OS.
* Finish the Tiger install on the first volume then install OS9 to the second. A real OS9 installer is the best way, since it will analyze the hardware and configure the OS9 Extensions and such automatically BUT you can just drag-copy-dump the OS9 System and Finder onto it and it will show up. You will have to do some System Folder tweaking yourself that way but it usually will just work.

This is the best way to dual-boot OS9 and OSX. It will prevent problems you don't need. Note that Spotlight is the first big troublemaker because it actively write OSX stuff around the OS9 stuff and so causes immediate issues.
Even without Spotlight working, having the two OS’es in close proximity can and does eventually cause problems… they just don’t appear as obvious dual-OS issues:
Random problems at boot, where you get to wait while OS9 “checks and repairs’ mysterious unexplained disk issues that occur more and more often…
Random hangs in OS9, again seemingly without good cause…

Trust me on this. It has been researched and debated around here forever.