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dr.zeissler

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 1, 2018
112
16
Hi there,

I am trying to get a trippeboot working on my G4/Mini. I did several attempts in several ways but it never worked in real trippleboot. I want to install MacOS9, MacOSX and Morphos on the local hard drive.

I need 4 Partitions
60 MB MOS Boot
15 GB MOS System
15 GB OS9
15 GB OSX Panher

If I partition with OS9 I get OS9 and Morphos working. If I install OSX then OS9 is not bootable anymore. If I load the OS9 CD I get "volume not mounted". Seems that OSX Panther is killing it when it installs on the partition I created before with OS9.

Same thing when partitioning with OSX. After installing OSX and MOS and booting the OS9 CD always tells me that the volume is not mounted and after I click initialize to get OS9 installed the partition table is destroyed and only OS9 is bootable. OSX and MOS had to be installed again and as you now, after OSX installation OS9 is broken again.

It seems to me that the issue is, that OSX does not support OS9 driver installation for the hard disk and it seems that it removes the OS9 driver from a previous OS9 installation. That's pretty bad. Seems that even a dual boot for OS9/OSX is not possible on a G4 Mini. I am not talking about classic, I am talking about the hacked OS9 for the Mac mini.

Any ideas what to try next.

Thx! Doc
 
Can't speak for Panther, but Tiger and Leopard are perfectly fine with being installed after OS 9, and in fact, I have had basically no luck getting OS 9 and Leopard to coexist unless 9 gets installed first. That's because they dropped support for the OS 9 disk driver in the Leopard Disk Utility. The only tools you want messing with the drive are ones that have support for the OS 9 driver. That's how I've managed to get OS 9, Tiger, Leopard, and Linux to live on the same drive, OS 9 doesn't care about formatting, just partitioning.

Not that I recommend doing that, especially when you can just have OS 9 live in the same partition as 10.4 and lower. And of course, manually partitioning for Linux is a massive pain. Really, the safest way should be to do all of your partitioning in OS 9.

What I don't know is what MorphOS brings to the table, how it handles partitions and partitioning on install. See, just editing partitions in Linux can be enough to break OS 9's ability to read a drive, and it's entirely possible MorphOS is doing something similar on installation. Modern operating systems will move partitions around for optimal drive performance, and if MorphOS is doing that, OS 9 would break in a heartbeat.

1734784323060.png


In short, this is the most important thing for OS 9. I've never actually had a clear understanding how this works, but without it, OS 9 will just not so much as be able to read the drive. It'll always be installed if you partition using OS 9.
 
This option "Install Mac OS 9 Disk Driver" is never visible for the internal drive of the G4mini or any partition regardless what filesystem, no chance, tried everything. Tested Panther and Tiger....no chance. It's even without Morphos installed.

I am currently testing a Firewire connected CF-Card. I see no chance for the internal drive.
 
This option is neither in Tiger on that machine for the internal drive of the Mac mini G4.
10.2 does not boot up on G4 Mini, have not tested to change disk on start (booting 10.3 inserting 10.2 run disk-utility).
 
Hmm, maybe the problem has to do with the fact the the Mini was never officially supported by OS 9? I wouldn't put it past Apple to not have OSX Disk Utilities to just not use OS 9 Drivers on Macs that don't support OS 9. But, if you set up all your partitions in OS 9, then the rest should just work, because in all my tinkering, formatting existing partitions never bothered anything, altering the partition layout did.
 
I am woking on a solution....seems I found it... currently still final testing.

OS9 can be booted on first external FW volume, not after a FW-Hub. So my FW-CF solution already works directly connected to the G4Mini, but not working as second device after a LaCie FW hard disk as second device. so the final solution should look like this.

MacMini G4
- 64 MB Boot MOS (HFS)
- 15 GB System MOS (MOS-SFS)
- 60 GB OSX 10.3 Panther including classic for testing purposes

LaCie FW
- 160 GB System OS9 native

LaCie FW
- 160 GB Data OSX whatever

Doc
 
Today I will setup MOS, OS9 and OSX are ready with full software installed.
There is a description to get MOS with a bootmenu which seems to be done in open firmware.
But I don't think I will do this.
 
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