installing OS 9 on external FW drive

[sonofslim]

ok, so: i'm trying to install OS 9 on an external FW drive. (i want 9, not classic.) but my internal drive doesn't have classic installed, so i have to run the installer from the original OS 9 CD.

however, when i boot from the install CD, it doesn't recognize the FW drive.

any ideas as to how i can get 9 onto an external drive?

thanks...

 

[tekton]

Dumb question/reply, but can you boot up from the OS9 cd by holding down the "c" key?
Other than that, what I did was use my notebook, which is still 9, to set up my FW hard disk with 9 and then just moved it over to my desktop, which is 10.2. Just some thoughts.

 

[sonofslim]

Originally posted by tekton
Dumb question/reply, but can you boot up from the OS9 cd by holding down the "c" key?

when i did that, the drive setup wouldn't recognize the external drive -- meaning i couldn't install 9 onto it. but i figured out the problem, which turned out to be a stupid mistake on my part. what i was lacking on my internal drive was the OS 9 drivers, which only means i can't boot from 9 on my internal. i can run classic fine & dandy by just dropping a system folder (such as the one on the 9 install cd) onto my drive. from that, i can run the installer and put 9 on the external.

of course, now i can't boot from the external. i'm hoping it's a jumper thing, but i suspect it's just not possible to boot into 9 from an external drive. anyone know any different?

 

[spencecb]

I've been wondering the same things....about booting from the external drive

 

[jxyama]

the external must be "blessed." dunno how that works, but for example, if you use carbon copy cloner, that's what it claims to do. once CCC copies an OS to an external, it then "blesses" the drive. the external can be then chosen as a bootable option under system pref. -> startup disk.

using CCC i put my old jaguar on an ext and i can boot off of it. not sure how it would work for OS 9, though...

(you do have an older OS 9 bootable Mac, i assume...)

 

[sonofslim]

the external is blessed, thanks to the startup disk applescript (www.missingmanuals.com) and the computer itself is OS 9 bootable.

but i've been doing some reading and it looks like it might just be a jumper issue. oops, looks like this software thread has become a hardware discussion.

i seem to recall seeing somewhere in these forums that an external drive had to be set to master -- don't know if that applies to just FW or not. right now my internal is master and external is slave; i'll try reversing that when i get home.