Reparation old Mac disk

[jamie marchant]

HI

 Do you know a way of repartitioning and old Mac disk, Disk Tools on the OS X CD wants to reformat the drive first? I want to run Mac OS 9 and OS X without upgrading and using Classic. 

-Jamie 

 

[Cory5412]

You can not re-partition a disk on an older Mac without completely wiping. This was added to the OS for Intel-based Macs, for BootCamp, and expanded in scope a little bit just a few years ago.

To do what you want:

I would back up your OS9 install by just copying everything on your disk to another disk. You'll have to copy the contents of your Desktop separately, maybe make a folder at the root level of your disk called "from-desktop" and put everything in there.

Once you have backed up your data:

I recommend you boot into an OS 9 CD and run Drive Setup (in the utilities folder) to partition the drive how you want it, and then install OS 9 where it'll go or restore the backup of your OS9 install, then boot into your OS X CD/DVD and install OS X on the partition you want it to live on.

 

[jamie marchant]

I only have 1 spare Mac drive and I got it for free from a guy and don't know if it works. 

Does Gparted support old Mac drives, if so I would take out the hard drive and repartition it in Linux.

 

[Cory5412]

It might, but I do not recommend doing that without having a backup of your data.

 

[jamie marchant]

The problem is where to put it where it will keep the resource forks intact, it's a 40 GB drive and I don't want OS X.2 badly enough(in terms of my time) to image the whole thing. After I am done working, I'll see if I have DVD burning software on OS 9, I only used about 3 GB so it would fit on a DVD-R. (it would be an HFS+ CD) 

 

[Cory5412]

USB external hard disk (up to 2TB) will work. You can format the disk in OS9 as HFS+ and it will preserve your data. Only up to 200GB partitions are bootable, so you might want to repartition such a disk.

Disk Copy on OS 9 should be able to make a DVD image, and I belive the DVD burning app can burn DC6 images, but I don't remember the exact procedure to do so.

 

[jamie marchant]

I don't feel like repartition my 1 TB terrible drive cause that's slightly dangerous, so DVD is the way to go.    

 

[Cory5412]

External USB hard disks and flash drives are usually very inexpensive, so that is an option. My local Target has a Sandisk 16GB USB 2.0 flash drive (will work on USB 1.1) for $5.

The one gotcha is, is this for a PCI Graphics PowerMac G4? I don't know if that machine can boot USB, but you can boot an OS9 CD, copy everything to the flash drive, partition your disk, copy everything back, and then reboot from your disk, and then you can continue with your OSX installation.

 

[jamie marchant]

Hmm, my Mac seems to reject DVD-Rs. I do have a PC DVD-ROM drive in it and it does read DVD-R them but eject blank discs upon insert. So it this point I don't have a good way of backing the thing up, over then DD images, which I don't want to at the moment. Could I make an HFS+ disk image on Linux and copy the files they? 

 

[jamie marchant]

I am now putting programs into Stuffit Archives then I will move these to my flash drive. This will save the resources forks. 

 

[Cory5412]

If you have an appleshare server (windows NT4-2003 services for mac, or netatalk), that software itself should preserve the resource fork on the host system.

As far as a flash drive goes, you can use a disk image or stuffit to preserve the forks, but if you don't intent to use those files elsewhere, you can also just format it HFS or HFS+.

 

[jamie marchant]

I can't find my spare flash drives offhand and this one needs to be PC compatible and again I don't want to repartition the drive.  

 

[pcamen]

I used to use a GParted Live CD to do stuff like that on both Macs and PC's.  For example, I used to hate it when Dell servers came with a small boot partition and the rest of the drive set up as a data partition; never understood the point in that.   So I would boot into the GParted Live CD (or USB stick ... I still have one), delete the data partition and grow the boot partition to take up the entire disk.

I believe it can shrink an HFS+ partition (but not grow it) such that you can create another partition from the empty space. 

https://gparted.org/features.php

 

[jamie marchant]

Well, it half worked, my Mac OS 9 partition is visible from OS X.2 but not Mac OS 8.6 or 9 and I can't boot it(gets stuck at the Happy Mac screen OR worse flashing ? on a floppy). I think Classic works but I don't want the overhead of OS X when running OS 9 apps. Any idea what is wrong? 

 

[jamie marchant]

UPDATE: Classsic in OS X does work, so that data is there but something changed in the partition table that makes it unbootable directly.

 

[jamie marchant]

UPDATE: Classic does run very well performance-wise but it still takes an extra minute or so to start OS X if all I want to run is OS 9 programs, also I have at least one game that won't run under Classic at all. 

Also I am going to see if anyone on the GParted form knows what's going on but it's late now so I probably will do that tomorrow. 

 

[jamie marchant]

UPDATE: In case it helps, neither partition is visible in OS 8/9. 

 

[jamie marchant]

Does anyone know about the Apple Partition Map, maybe Gparted needs to change something in one of the driver partitions in order for Mac OS 8.6 and 9 to see the drive?  

 

[jamie marchant]

Just in case anyone has any ideas on this issue, you can find my progress on it here: http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?pid=35453#p35453.