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Author Topic: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?  (Read 13680 times)

twokayprod

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How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« on: July 02, 2014, 06:49:07 AM »

Hi there OS Niners  :)
I'll try to make it brief. I bought a new G4 (with two 533 cores) back when it came out, because of its audio capabilities. Since I also used it as my everyday computer, at some point I had to put OS X on. Then in 2009 I put it aside and bought a MacBook which I'm still using for everything.
Now, I have a good sounding recording room somewhere else and want to use the G4 for tracking sessions, so I unpacked it, set it up and turned it on for the first time in years. It still runs like a charm, but here's the thing. Right now, there's two systems installed: OS 9.2.2 and OS X 10.3.9. Also, somewhere along the way, I added things like an USB 2.0 card, some WLAN card-thing, a new harddrive (128 GB), a total of 1.25GB of RAM and maybe something else I can't remember... ???

Now, since it will only be used as a recording device, I want to streamline it as much as possible. I want only OS 9.2.2 on it with only the applications needed to record. What would be the best way to achieve this? If at all possible, I'd rather not initialize the whole thing and start from scratch, since I already have 9.2.2 with all the drivers I need installed. There's an ATI card and two TFT-Monitors (which were ridiculously expensive at that time  :o ), there's a MOTU 828 with FW and I also have Opcode, OMS and whatever other stuff was recommended by my retailer back then (an old Steinberg USB-2-MIDI interface for instance). I think I also still have Cubase 5 VST 32, Logic 4.6.1 and Reason 3 installed as well as Audio Desk (which came with the 828), but from now on, I only need one - preferrably Cubase.

So, what's your thoughts? How to proceed? I still love my old G4 and want to remake it into the badass machine it is  -afro-

Thank you very much for your help - and for this website of course  :D
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supernova777

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Re: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« Reply #1 on: July 02, 2014, 08:47:04 AM »

hey twookay...

do u have 2 drives? or your single drive partitioned in 2? or are both X + 9 both installed on the same single drive?
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MDD

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Re: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« Reply #2 on: July 02, 2014, 11:54:35 AM »

Hi !

When I had both systems on the same HD I used to drag the Macintosh HD (or whatever yours HD name is) over File Buddy window, this should show invisible files of Mac OS X. Trash them as well those other folders belonging to Mac OS X.

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coachla

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Re: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« Reply #3 on: July 02, 2014, 11:18:54 PM »

MDDs method is the way I have done it. Leopard is particularly annoying to get rid of. Keep Leopard away from OS9!
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twokayprod

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Re: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« Reply #4 on: July 03, 2014, 06:20:28 AM »

Wow, that was fast. Thank you all  :)

First, to answer the question: I've got one harddrive which is divided into 4 partitions (no idea why I did that back then…):

#1: 10 GB - OS 9 System
#2: 20 GB - OS X System
#3: 42 GB - empty space
#4: 43 GB - empty space

Sorry for being stupid, but it's been a long time since I've worked with OS 9 and I'm not much of a computer guy anyway. So I don't even know/remember what File Buddy is or where to find it  :-[ I don't have any internet connection where the G4 is, so I have to figure it out at home first.


I take it there's no way of cleaning out the 3 partitions, maybe even make them into one, without touching the OS 9 partition, right?
Is it a good solution to just erase what I don't want - or would it be better to empty the whole drive and start again, installing only OS 9 and only the drivers and programs I need? It's more comfortable to not touch the, well, running system. But I want the best solution for this, not just avoid it, because it's more work…

Thoughts?

Thank you  :)



p.s. almost forgot: It's not Leopard, it's 10.3.9 - that's Panther I think…


p.p.s. ok, I just downloaded File Buddy 7.6 - just in case. Since the G4 can't be connected to the net, I need to download/burn everything with my MacBook and then take it to the G4...
« Last Edit: July 03, 2014, 06:33:23 AM by twokayprod »
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supernova777

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Re: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« Reply #5 on: July 03, 2014, 07:15:06 AM »

if youve got it seperated on a partition already, u can just wipe the partition
but.. i strongly reccomend u dont.
if you dont use osx panther, then just let it sit there unused. its not goiing to hurt anything
and then if u need it for whatever reason one day, its there.

best thing to do . just leave it..

if it aint broke dont FIX


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twokayprod

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Re: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« Reply #6 on: July 03, 2014, 07:58:41 AM »

okay, sounds reasonable.

But here's another stupid question  :D
Is it possible to install a second harddrive (maybe even a SSD, that would be supercool) and transfer or copy or whatever the OS 9 there - and then just wipe the whole first harddrive clean to use it as space?
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supernova777

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Re: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« Reply #7 on: July 03, 2014, 09:46:30 AM »

absolutely. this is referred to as cloning.. recently we are trying to com up with a reliable way of doing this..
but untill ive done more testing re; cloning process, i would reccommend u simply reinstall to ensure 100% proper installation.
i have seen some errors occur when cloning mac os 9 from a partitioned drive.. im trying to figure out how to do this without any errors.. or rather how to instruct others to do this
without them having difficulty + frustration + errors ;)

if u really want to go ahead and try to clone, i use disk utility inside of mac os x..(or a specific cloning app such as superduper or carbon copy cloner) to create a backup .dmg of the os
adn then format the new installation media, if u are interested in cloning that same drive again for backup purposes in the future i reccomend using a moderate size disk such as a 64gb ssd or a 80gb sata drive
and not partitioning the drive, (making the disk one partition of 100% its size) and formatting it to mac os extended (non-journalled, journalling is an osx technology and shouldnt be present on any disks tha twill be accessed via mac os 9 as this can cause problems.. if u are doing a dual boot osx system i make all my systems non-journalled even on the mac os x partition its not neccessary at all)
after the destination partition is formatted i would use the fresh drag install on our site (here -> http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=1035.0)
and download DOWNLOAD LINK 2 (OS X Format), unstuff this file on osx (you may have to download stuffit expander for panther -> http://www.stuffit.com/guide/General/GetExpander.html this page reccomends StuffIt Expander version 10.0.2 for Mac OS 10.3 panther)  so visit this page to finally download that version ->http://www.stuffit.com/mac-expander-download.html and select StuffIt Expander 10.0.2 (.dmg) OS X 10.3 - 10.3.9  stuffit is a pain in the ass;)

finally use stuffit expander to extract the .img.sitx  then double click the .img file, it will mount to your desktop same as an external cd or disk would in osx.. then simply drag the files there to the new disk that you formatted to Mac os Extended non journalled and your new installation is ready to boot into. go to System Preferences -> and select start up disk and choose mac os 9.2.2 on the partition as your startup disk and restart.


http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=306.0 this thread is one discussing how to add sata to a  g4

if money is no object and u want the ultimate performance we reccomend nothing else other then a 64bit pci card (such as the http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-1ve2plus2/ or http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-1v4/) from seritek that will offer up to 533mb/s
giving u the absolute best disk performance in mac os 9 possible . (possibly to achieve the ultimate fastest speed tho you would have to use some 3rd party raid to combine two disks into one to use the full bandwidth of the card, if you want to get technical but u can disregard this info becaues the card will work plenty fast with just 1 drive connected normally aswell)

if u are out of slots or you want a more cost effective solution that will still perform great
see the adapter in the particular post by mactron http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=306.msg1072#msg1072
i believe this adapter can be used in both directions.. ie: to add an IDE drive to a sata system, and to add a sata drive to an IDE system.
mactron? can u confirm this?

in his post hes explained that he was using his with a samsung ssd i believe.


« Last Edit: July 03, 2014, 10:14:57 AM by chrisNova777 »
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twokayprod

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Re: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« Reply #8 on: July 03, 2014, 11:54:26 AM »

Wow, that's a lot of info, thanks for taking the time  :)
This seems like the best option to me so far (buying a SSD and installing OS 9 from scratch, if I fail for whatever reason, I'd still have what's installed right now.) I'm gonna do my homework with those links you provided and then return with more stupid questions  -afro-
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twokayprod

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Re: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« Reply #9 on: July 06, 2014, 04:25:58 AM »

Ok, I've read through all the links and, who would have thought, I have a question  ::)
What's the actual difference between such a PCI-SATA card and the adapter-thingy? The adapter is a lot cheaper, and if it works well, why would I even want a card? I'm not planning on hooking up more than one SSD, just one to put OS 9 on and I'll use the harddrive that's already in there as empty space.

And I'm a bit confused about the 64 vs 32 Bit. Can my G4 handle 64 Bit? It's the Digital Audio with 2x 533 MHz. There's empty slots but I don't know if they're PCIs or PCI-Xs, I might be able to check tomorrow, though...

I went through all the cards that are mentioned here and the only one I could find over here (Germany) is the Sonnet Tempo Serial ATA for about 79,- bucks. Thoughts on that one?

Thanks again  :)
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supernova777

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Re: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« Reply #10 on: July 06, 2014, 04:36:02 AM »

the only real difference is its an addon controller. meaning its adding the ability to add those devices to the mac, in addition to the original ports on the motherboard..
so u could use the original port for an ide device for storage purposes..

also the pci sata card has a chance of being noticably faster then the original hard drive controller aswell.

the slots in your g4 are what is called "pci 64" so its 64 bit running at 33mhz
physically compatible with pci-x (Same size longer pci card)


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twokayprod

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Re: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« Reply #11 on: July 06, 2014, 04:58:30 AM »

So, if I got this right, an adapter would do just fine for my purposes, IF it's not a lot slower than the card-solution, right?
Since such an adapter is less than 10,- bucks, I could just try that and if I'm not satisfied, just swap it with a card. Is it really that easy??

The adapter Mactron uses is not an option, though, they don't ship to Germany  :'( but there seem to be a lot of similar ones around and since it's just an adapter, I don't have to worry about it being Mac OS 9 compatible or anything. Am I correct?

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supernova777

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Re: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« Reply #12 on: July 06, 2014, 05:10:46 AM »

So, if I got this right, an adapter would do just fine for my purposes, IF it's not a lot slower than the card-solution, right?
Since such an adapter is less than 10,- bucks, I could just try that and if I'm not satisfied, just swap it with a card. Is it really that easy??

The adapter Mactron uses is not an option, though, they don't ship to Germany  :'( but there seem to be a lot of similar ones around and since it's just an adapter, I don't have to worry about it being Mac OS 9 compatible or anything. Am I correct?

if you need more connections for hard drives + are interested in top speeds, get a pci sata adapter
put it this way.. a pci sata adapter copying files to a drive on the IDE bus is going to be alot faster then copying between two hd's on the same ide bus
because u have the bandwidth of the pci sata connection (133mb/s) on top of the bandwidth of the ide bus (which is an ATA-66 or ATA-100 connection)
in that situation u have full bandwidth of 2 seperate busses communicating/copying to each other..  so it works extremely well, as opposed to 2 devices that share the same bus, would have only the full bandwidth of the bus to share between the two devices so in essence it would only have 50% bandwidth available to each device.. and it doesnt really work that efficiently with 2 devices on the same bus..  kind of like copying a file from a hard drive to itself, the speed sucks compaerd to copying a file from one drive to another drive.. this is the same reason why protools always required a seperate drive for recording to.. so that they could guarantee the performance of the software!


according to the info on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA would max out at 66mb/s or 100mb/s max speed, and devices rarely perform at MAX, usually some place around 70% of max, so ata-66 in reality would perform at top speed of 45mb/s, and ata-100 wouldnt perform above 65-70mb/s) the pci sata card is SATA150 (which is usually 150mb/s max speed, but is limited slighly by the pci connection to 133mbs/ so that places its top performance thruput (@ 70% like i said) to be between 93mb/s + 105mb/S..)

So as u can see..
depends on how serious performance u are interested in achieving..
are u ok with 45mb/s? (same ide controller) or do u want 93mb/s? (pci sata) or do u want even faster then that? (possible with the seritek 1v4 64bit card)
any ssd will give u noticable speed improvements of moving parts drives... regardless of how its connected... and will ensure u get the top speed.. possible.. for example a ssd connected to your ide controller using that adapter thing,, u might gget above 45mb/s, that number is based on ata-66 (if thats what u have) ssd would allow u to acheive close to max of whatever controller u have over ide

which g4 do u have? (so i can determine what speed the ide connection is..?)

re: the cheap adapter is os independant CORRECT;) all its doing is connecting the old interface to the new.. and vice versa so whatevers connected will function the same as it would connected to the original IDE interface, providing compatibility with no performance increase



« Last Edit: July 06, 2014, 05:20:53 AM by chrisNova777 »
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twokayprod

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Re: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« Reply #13 on: July 06, 2014, 05:32:23 AM »

Ah, I think I get it  :D
So according to your estimates, a card would be about twice the speed of an adapter (~93 vs ~45MB/s). That seems like it's worth the 79,- for the Sonnet card. I couldn't find any Seriteks over here (or any shop that would ship them here for that matter).

 I have the G4 that was called Digital Audio with the Dual 533 MHz. Or what specs do you need? I can look it up tomorrow or take pictures of the inside or whatever.
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supernova777

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Re: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« Reply #14 on: July 06, 2014, 05:37:49 AM »

if u have the dual processor 533, then yes that mac only has an ATA-66 ide bus (refer to my chart here http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=578.0)
and you would stand to gain some great benefit in disk speed by connecting your main system drive to a sonnet tempo sata pci adapter!

the worst thing about that system when it first came out it was limited by the ATA-66 ide bus, and also the performance of the drives back then were CRAP!
we have much more efficient drives now that would be able to take advantage but like i said even with the faster drives (even up to SSD, they would be bottlenecked by this ATA-66 connection which has a max theoretical speed of 66mb/s, but real world performance max of around 45mb/s, in reality i would say the most u would see frm it would be around 35-40mb/s)

an SSD + pci sata card combo would make u feel like this machine is twice as fast! if u love to work with this mac and use it for doing creative work u would be happy with the results..  it would give u modern disk performance comparible to a 2005-2009 computer

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twokayprod

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Re: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« Reply #15 on: July 06, 2014, 05:59:40 AM »

Well, then that's exactly what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna order the Sonnet card and look for a good SSD. Any thoughts on a specific manufacturer or model? And how large should it be? Should I keep it small and use it for the system only or should I get 120 GB and use it for everything with my old harddrive as kind of a backup?

I also noticed, according to you chart, my Mac was the most expensive of them all - by far  :o
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supernova777

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Re: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« Reply #16 on: July 06, 2014, 06:12:48 AM »

yea! i noticed that fact too! insane price ;o

alot of people like to use OWC because they have a history of treating their customers good..
but u are in germany you said? so perhaps you would prefer to order thru a european company
any ssd is gonna be great performance really u cant realy go too wrong with which one to pick in my opinion
if u were to order a owc ssd i think it comes with sata-ide adapter + mounting kit + power adapter

http://eshop.macsales.com/search/legacy+ssd
choose any "legacy ssd"

hmm i see they added a 44gb option! lol
sounds low but u can do quite alot with 44gb on mac os 9!

Quote
Includes

    OWC Mercury Electra™ 3G SSD
    OWC Multi-Mount: 2.5" to 3.5" Hard Drive adapter bracket
    SATA to IDE adapter


u can of course get those mounting bracket + adapter seperately..
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twokayprod

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Re: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« Reply #17 on: January 22, 2015, 07:47:02 AM »

HAHA!! I'm baaaaack!  -afro-

Sorry for resurrecting this thread, but now it's actually happening. I had to change studio locations twice since the last post, so I put the upgrade on hold, but now I'm in a new spot - which is beautiful and huuuuge and I have a contract for the next 5 years.

I've ordered the Sonnet TSATA Tempo Serial ATA yesterday, should arrive tomorrow. Now I'm in the market for a SSD and found this one (through chrisNova's link): http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDMXLE120/ They ship to Germany at very reasonable rates, so I'm ready to order. Just wanted to check in before I do. Are the OWCs still the way to go? Will it work? Or are there any better options now?

Once again thank you!!  :D
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IIO

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Re: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« Reply #18 on: January 22, 2015, 11:15:02 AM »

anything smaller than 2000 gb will be fine. personally i´d go for the new samsung line.

but if you are okay with some 120 mb, eventually consider getting an older model second hand, because it will make no difference, speedwise.

dont forget that you might have to set jumpers for SATA devices higher than SATA-150 in order to work with that card. (copying files will break after a minute if you dont)
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MacTron

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Re: How to get rid of OS X on my old G4?
« Reply #19 on: January 22, 2015, 11:52:24 AM »

dont forget that you might have to set jumpers for SATA devices higher than SATA-150 in order to work with that card. (copying files will break after a minute if you dont)

This is a IDE/ATA SSD Internal Drive not a Card. The only jumpers you can find are the usually Master/slave from PATA drives.

And Yes, the Samsung SATA SSDs and a SATA to PATA adaptor is a cheaper option. And you can always buy a PCI SATA card later if you wish an speed upgrade.

This was discussed a lot of times here, please use the search function.
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