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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.   

[ceratophyllum]

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".
.
.
.

The problem is that I'm installing on unsupported (by OS 9) iBook 12" Radeon 9550 PowerBook6,7.  My first try was to install Tiger first and there was nothing about OS9 Drivers anywhere when I booted the Tiger install DVD and ran Disk Utility. Maybe DiskUtility is not offering this option because it knows OS9 is unsupported on this device?
Does OS X even care what is in open firmware? I have this dummy "screamer" sound thing to get OS9 to boot and yet sound still works in OS X. This suggests to me that Tiger doesn't care about this device node.

Anyway, I have this in nvramrc:

Code: [Select]

dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@0
80010201 encode-int " cpu-version" property
device-end

dev /pci@F2000000/mac-io/i2s/i2s-a
" screamer" encode-string " compatible" property
device-end

+ lots of other stuff that was there already


I will certainly do as you suggest with my other OS9-supported iBook G3, once I get an SSD + adapter for it.  It came with Tiger installed and I guess the previous owner had checked Install OS9 Drivers.....

Is there some means in OS X Tiger to tell whether OS9 Drivers are installed?

[GaryN]

I thought you were talking about the "iBook G3 12" 900MHz".

Getting OS9 on am unsupported 6,7 is a different issue altogether - one with which I'm not inclined to get involved with but I'm certain there is endless discussion about it to be found with a thorough Forum search.

"Install OS9 drivers" is an option that only appears when you first initialize and format a drive because it has to be done at the root level before anything else.

[IIO]

beside some other potential reasons, my first reason to install OS9 on another partition is that on the OSX partition there is already an OS9 folder which is used as classic enviroment.

which, in theory is also not absolutely necessary, but most of us would still recommend it.
 

[ceratophyllum]

Curiously, 2 partitions seems to never work for me on my (unsupported) iBook G4: I tried creating 2 partitions with OS 9, installing OS9 to the first, then installing OpenBSD on my second partition and was once again left with the OS 9 not booting with the ? Folder after carefully installing openbsd.  Somehow, installing OpenBSD to a free partition I had deliberately set aside using Drive Setup clobbered my OS 9 Disk drivers.

What exactly are "OS 9 Drivers" and where do they live?

I think I read speculation somewhere they were sort of like the MBR in a DOS/Windows hard drive and that "installing" them was like running fdisk /mbr in DOS.  If "OS 9 drivers"  are just a few bytes at the beginning of the drive, can't they just be backed up/restored using dd on OS X?

I think Silverlining can non-destructively restore "OS 9 drivers" but only if the disk is connected to the ATA bus: it can't do it for a mac in target-mode over firewire.

[IIO]

What exactly are "OS 9 Drivers" and where do they live?

think of it as something similar to the firmware of a PCI expansion card: it is on the card, but then later it more or less only extends the OS just like an INIT in / system extensions does it.
 
these things are required to make the computer handle stuff before the OS is even booted, that´s why they are outside.

on an SATA card the driver is on a chip.

for the usb keyboard the usb basic driver is in the firmware of the computer.

the OS9 harddisk driver resides in, or better: before the partition map of the drive (which is APM in the case of machines which should boot into OS9.)

afaik as i remember the disk driver resides simply at the logical block #0 of the disk, then from block #1 on the partition map starts.

many people call it "driver partition", but i don think that this is a good description of what happens.

one can probably also explain it better than me.

you can not turn it on and off without reinitialisation/data loss.
the only thing what sometimes work is that it can be "updated" after it is partially corrupt. the drive setup program will tell you when that is the case.
 
 
it is fine to format everything for OSX, but dont forget to doublecheck "APM" and "OS9 Drivers" before you use it, or you can format again.

when you attempt to format the drive on an intel mac, then you have to use the shell to format, because the drive util hides the options for APM and OS9 Driver. if you do that, make sure you do not overwrite the wrong disk.

[joevt]

Apple Partition Map contents:

Code: [Select]

APM Block 0 contents
000: sbSig      : 'ER' = sbSIGWord
002: sbBlkSize  : 512
004: sbBlkCount : 4507424 = 2307 MB = 2200 MiB
012: DDMap[0]:  23 @ 64   0x0001 = kDriverTypeMacSCSI         
01a: DDMap[1]:  36 @ 120  0xffff = kDriverTypeMacSCSIChained 
022: DDMap[2]:  21 @ 176  0x0701 = kDriverTypeMacATA         
02a: DDMap[3]:  34 @ 232  0xf8ff = kDriverTypeMacATAChained   

Partition Map contents (10 partitions)
 1:         63 @ 1          Type:"Apple_partition_map" Name:"Apple" Status:00000003=Valid,Allocated
 2:         56 @ 64         Type:"Apple_Driver43" Name:"Macintosh" Status:00000103=Valid,Allocated,ChainCompatible BootSize:11286 BootCksum:0x0000F1F0 Processor:"68000" Pad:70744452 = 'ptDR' = kPatchDriverSignature
 3:         56 @ 120        Type:"Apple_Driver43" Name:"Macintosh" Status:00000303=Valid,Allocated,ChainCompatible,RealDeviceDriver BootSize:18142 BootCksum:0x0000040F Processor:"68000" Pad:00010600 = kSCSIDriverSignature
 4:         56 @ 176        Type:"Apple_Driver_ATA" Name:"Macintosh" Status:00000103=Valid,Allocated,ChainCompatible BootSize:10490 BootCksum:0x00007EB4 Processor:"68000" Pad:70744452 = 'ptDR' = kPatchDriverSignature
 5:         56 @ 232        Type:"Apple_Driver_ATA" Name:"Macintosh" Status:00000303=Valid,Allocated,ChainCompatible,RealDeviceDriver BootSize:17254 BootCksum:0x00003417 Processor:"68000" Pad:77696b69 = 'wiki' = kATADriverSignature
 6:        512 @ 288        Type:"Apple_FWDriver" Name:"Macintosh" Status:00000003=Valid,Allocated
 7:        512 @ 800        Type:"Apple_Driver_IOKit" Name:"Macintosh" Status:00000003=Valid,Allocated
 8:        512 @ 1312       Type:"Apple_Patches" Name:"Patch Partition" Status:00000003=Valid,Allocated
 9:     409600 @ 1824       Type:"Apple_HFS" Name:"Macintosh HD" Status:40000033=Valid,Allocated,Readable,Writeable,MountedAtStartup
10:    4096000 @ 411424     Type:"Apple_HFS" Name:"Infinite HD" Status:40000033=Valid,Allocated,Readable,Writeable,MountedAtStartup

There's some info in block Apple Partition Map block 0 including the number of block on the disk and a Driver Descriptor Map.

Partition 1 begins at block 1 and is up to 63 blocks in length.
Partition 2 to 8 are Mac OS 9 drivers
2 and 3 are SCSI
4 and 5 are IDE/ATA
6 is FireWire (appears to be all zeros?)
7 is Mac OS X related? (appears to be all zeros?)
8 is patches for something?
9 and 10 are HFS partitions. 9 contains Mac OS 8.6.

There's some info at
 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn/tn1189.html