NT on PowerPC Macs!

[Amethyst1]

Windows 2000 only supposed x86.

And 32bit Alpha up to RC2, and it was also ported to the Itanium. It was shown at WinHEC 1999:

Intel has been providing a great IA-64 development environment for us.It’s actually an emulator for the Merced chip set.So, what you see over here is, if you take a look at your screen, it is Windows 2000.
[…]
So what we’ve got on our Alpha system, again, the same thing, a 64-bit Windows 2000.

XP for 64bit Alpha actually saw the light of day again.

 

[Project Alice]

@Rairii
I just reinstalled, this time setting up a dualboot with Tiger. Tiger basically doesn’t recognize the NTFS partition whatsoever. When I was installing Tiger I actually thought the Mac partition wasn’t created, I only noticed that the only volume available in DU was smaller than the actual drive.

I installed Tiger assuming I would have have the normal NTFS support Tiger has, and then would be able to install a write driver to copy stuff over to NT vs burning a CD every time. This would be the normal behavior had I plugged in a drive that had any version of x86 Windows installed on it. Is there any reason for this or a workaround/plan for a workaround?

In the second screenshot, the NT partition does show up in diskutil as a CD partition. I told it to mount, and while it did say it was mounted, nothing actually happened.

In the GUI disk utility all it shows is the 10GB Tiger partition, and thinks there’s ~7GB unallocated.

 

[Rairii]

@Rairii
I just reinstalled, this time setting up a dualboot with Tiger. Tiger basically doesn’t recognize the NTFS partition whatsoever. When I was installing Tiger I actually thought the Mac partition wasn’t created, I only noticed that the only volume available in DU was smaller than the actual drive.

I installed Tiger assuming I would have have the normal NTFS support Tiger has, and then would be able to install a write driver to copy stuff over to NT vs burning a CD every time. This would be the normal behavior had I plugged in a drive that had any version of x86 Windows installed on it. Is there any reason for this or a workaround/plan for a workaround?

In the second screenshot, the NT partition does show up in diskutil as a CD partition. I told it to mount, and while it did say it was mounted, nothing actually happened.

In the GUI disk utility all it shows is the 10GB Tiger partition, and thinks there’s ~7GB unallocated.

The way the dualboot partitioning works currently, I deliberately do not add the NT partition into the APM partition table directly - there is a dummy partition that covers it, but that starts before the NT partition and not at the NT partition, and it also covers the ARC system partition located after the NT partition.

This was done deliberately, as I wasn't sure if there would be compatibility issues with allowing other OSes to mount the NT partitions. (Also, I deliberately used the "CD_partition_scheme" type for this, as that's one of the types hardcoded to not show up in OSX Disk Utility.)

 

[Project Alice]

The way the dualboot partitioning works currently, I deliberately do not add the NT partition into the APM partition table directly - there is a dummy partition that covers it, but that starts before the NT partition and not at the NT partition, and it also covers the ARC system partition located after the NT partition.

This was done deliberately, as I wasn't sure if there would be compatibility issues with allowing other OSes to mount the NT partitions. (Also, I deliberately used the "CD_partition_scheme" type for this, as that's one of the types hardcoded to not show up in OSX Disk Utility.)

That makes sense of what I found then.

I don’t think mounting the NT partition would cause any issues though. I don’t know enough about the other ones, ARC, etc though. So maybe there would be issues there.

But I have used Macs for years to rummage through PC HDD’s, and even writing to them and there’s never been any ill effects on the Windows side afterwards. Tiger only mounts NTFS as read only without a 3rd party driver anyway.

 

[joevt]

Doesn't macOS mount NTFS as read only? I'm pretty sure macOS is smart enough not to mess with partition types that it doesn't understand.

The NT partition doesn't include x86 stuff so a VM on an Intel Mac can't boot it, etc.

Open Firmware can deal with FAT partition but not NTFS.