OS 9?

[mloret]

I have a Performa 6300CD running OS8. I want to get OS 9 on the hard drive but I don't know how to create a bootable disk. I have downloaded several ISO's and my modern Mac running OS 10.15 will not mount any of them. Can anyone give me a hand? I found this youtube of a guy doing it but he's using an ancient version of OS X that has classic. I don't have this kind of machine, though I do have emulators. Any suggestion is appreciated.

 

[cheesestraws]

You don't need to mount an ISO to be able to burn it. Drag it into Disk Utility and it'll appear in the list on the left, then you can burn it. Be careful, though, a lot of the images out there are damaged and won't boot properly, so it can be a bit of a faff getting a working one.

 

[volvo242gt]

^This. You may need to add .iso to the end of the .toast on the filename. That said, under 10.9.5, I haven't had to. So, YMMV.

 

[mloret]

I am not able to drag any of those ISO's into disk utility. Not sure what I am doing wrong. I also can't do "open disk image".

 

[mloret]

I'm gonna try to burn one of the ISO's from Finder and see what happens.

 

[MacKilRoy]

I am not able to drag any of those ISO's into disk utility. Not sure what I am doing wrong. I also can't do "open disk image".

Have you tried changing the file extension from .toast to be .iso ?

 

[mikes-macs]

This is the place where you can get a .dmg of the Mac OS 9 CD. I hope this works for you.

MacFixer Vintage Software Library

Software download library for vintage Mac software.

obsolete.macfixer.com

 

[mloret]

I burned one of the ISOs to CD from the Finder and it worked! I was able to install onto the hard drive of my PowerPC. Apparently you don't need to boot from the CD. Thank you for your suggestions.

 

[cheesestraws]

Oh, yeah, if you have a working MacOS on the machine already, that's the easiest option.

Glad it's working now!

 

[CTB]

From my experience you also need to choose the slowest write speed you can. I find any disc written above 4x rarely works when I try it in an old Mac. My current Mac Studio with Apple external SuperDrive doesn’t give me a speed option (it is greyed out at “Maximum” which is about 20x). Most discs I have burned at this speed won’t work in older CD drives. If I use my old PM G4 and burn at 1x the same image works fine in older drives.