MDD G4... one dumb question

[Gorgonops]

Recently I (foolishly?) agreed to take a dual 1.25 Ghz MDD G4 Tower (OS 9-bootable, not FW800) off a coworkers' hands for $50. (I'm not sure why. I think I had this vague idea that I could let my two-year-old bang on it instead of a fragile old Powerbook.) I'll be getting it today, supposedly it has a number of goodies that might make it worth the price. (a second video and USB 2.0 cards, etc.) Worst comes to worse I guess I might be able to flip it for what I paid for it.

I have one silly question about this monster that perhaps someone with experience could enlighten me on: I'm not sure how large of hard drive it's coming with. If it's "small" I figured I'd toss in a 400GB drive from a retired server I have lying around. From my research it appears that MDDs have no problem with large IDE drives under OS X. However; I *may* occasionally want to boot OS 9 on this thing. (Most of the rest of the time I suspect I'll run Tiger, although it's possible it might end up dual-booting Leopard if I desperately need it for compatibility with something that needs 10.5 but otherwise works on a G4. That's a small category to be sure.) So...

This somewhat confusing KB article says: "If you plan to start the partition up from Mac OS 9.2.2, the partition sizes may be a maximum of 200 GB. If you have a drive that is larger than 200 GB in size, you will need to create multiple partitions with no single partition exceeding 200 GB in size. Once formatted, the drive will be recognized under the version of Mac OS 9.2.2 that comes with the Power Mac G4 (Mirrored Drive Doors) and later products..." Does this mean that a partition larger than 200GB won't be seen by OS 9, a drive with *any* partition on it larger than 200GB won't be seen by OS 9, or that if I have a drive with such partitions on it they'll be in mortal danger if I *ever* boot into OS 9, even from another drive?

If it means a drive with larger partitions will be ignored, or that partitions larger than 200GB will be ignored, then I'm not too worried. (I could always put a smaller drive in alongside the larger one for OS 9.) I'm mostly worried about the "will it completely trash and/or threaten to reformat larger drives every time it's booted" scenario. If anyone has such a monster and could let me know whether it's "silent treatment" or "active hostility" thanks ahead of time.

Anyway, yay. I suppose I'll have to dispose of my G4-ed B&W now... ;^b

 

[Anonymous Freak]

I'm sure others who have personal experience with such machines can give you a 'from personal experience' answer, but here's my understanding:

OS 9 will only recognize partitions under 200 GB. The fact that there are partitions larger than that on the system will not be a problem.

So if you want to boot OS 9, make one partition for OS 9, and fill the rest with your OS X partition.

 

[zerotypeq]

IIRC 200gb or smaller partitions can only be read by os9 say you have a 600gig drive and it is partitioned in 200gb and 400gb it would boot fine off the 200gb partition but absolutely could not see the 400+ one. Also, if you are interested in flipping it let me know I'd like a MDD.

 

[H3NRY]

OS 9 can work with large drives up to 2TB if you find a copy of MacOS ROM version 9.5 or later. The ROM file that came on the MDD's CD or an iMac/iBook G4 or other late version of the Classic System Folder is needed. That said, I've used a 500GB drive on a B&W with the MacOS ROM file that shipped with OS 9.2.2 without problems, but the drive was not full, so it's possible it might have failed when it got more than 200 GB of data.

 

[kissmyash933]

the MDD has absolutely no problems at all running large IDE hard drives; In fact, I believe that the MDD came in a server configuration with a set of large hard disks in it at some point.

If you do want to run OS 9 in it, you could always put OS X on the large drive and then put a second drive in and run OS 9 from it.

Blake.

 

[Gorgonops]

So, I picked up the machine yesterday afternoon. The complete inventory of stuff in it was as follows:

2x 1.25Ghz CPU

2 GB RAM

Airport

250 GB HD

1x Radeon 9000 Pro AGP with DVI and ADC ports. (W/ADC->DVI dongle)

1x Radeon 9200 PCI w/DVI, VGA, and Svideo

1x 2 port USB 2.0 PCI

1x 4 port USB 1.1 PCI (previous owner just added ports instead of using a hub.)

1x 4 port Firewire PCI

The best part was I got it for $20 instead of $50. ;^)

Rather than futz around with using the (Panther) restore disks and updating from there I grabbed a Firewire cable and my Macbook, booted the machine in target disk mode, partitioned the hard disk into two chunks of 10 and 230 GB, and used Carbon Copy Cloner to image the larger part with a Tiger image I'd built when prepping some PB G4s last year. It took the essentially the rest of the evening to download software updates over my snot-slow Internet connection so I haven't had a chance to futz with OS 9 booting yet. My plan for later today is to drag a copy of the 9 system folder to the small partition and see if it:

A: boots from that, and

B: if once booted it sees the larger partition

Anyway, I guess I'll see what version of the MacOS ROM is present in the 9 system folder I have... it's one off a Tiger restore disk included with a late-model Aluminum Powerbook. If there's issues I'll look into extracting the OS 9 from the restore disk that came with it.

I do have to admit I'm pretty impressed how fast OS X feels on the MDD. Basically every G4 (other than my sluggish B&W) I've ever used has been a Powerbook, and I don't think even the last 1.67Ghz one felt this quick. (Undoubtedly the fast desktop drive helps a lot.) Woot.

 

[zerotypeq]

the 1.42x2MDD I briefly had was very very snappy. Even my 1X2G4 QS was a very snappy machine. In all fairness I was using an 800mhz ibook g3 as my other osx machine at the time, but I was still pleasantly surprised with leopards performance on the qs.

 

[Macman756]

Wow nice score! Wanna sell it????

 

[Gorgonops]

Wow nice score! Wanna sell it????

I think I'll keep it for the moment. ;^)

So, upon trying the "boot to OS 9" experiment, when I boot a system file dragged over from my main drive to the tiny one it does see the oversize partition. On the downside, the "Classic" folder seems to be missing a few important bits. (I noticed there was no sound, so upon investigation I discovered that among other things the Sound control panel is missing. Doh!)

I suppose if I find some real reason to use it I'll dig into the restore disks and see if they have a more complete OS 9 on them. Feh. Seriously, Apple...