Unsupported eMac - any way to get OS 9 to show in OS X startup disk selector?

[3lectr1cPPC]

Today I wiped my eMac clean and dual-booted Mac OS 9 and Sorbet Leopard on it. It’s a 1.0GHz model, but it’s the SuperDrive variant that doesn’t officially support OS 9 booting. The macos9lives patched CD took care of that pretty quick, but because it’s unsupported, the OS 9 partition doesn’t show up in the OS X Startup Disk preference pane. I can select the OS 9 drive from the bootpicker, but this takes a lot longer due to having to wait for it to finish searching the bus for bootable volumes. Is there any way to force the OS X preference pane to show the OS 9 volume, or am I stuck doing it this way? OS 9‘s control panel has no issue selecting the OS X volume.

Thanks!

 

[bloedmage]

Run the following script in the terminal, it should enable OS9 in the Startup Disk PrefPane in OS X.

#!/bin/sh
echo Enabling OS 9 booting...
echo "You may have to enter your password"
# Use nvram command to setup nvramrc with script to make open firmware changes
sudo nvram nvramrc='" /" select-dev
" PowerMac4,4" encode-string " model" property
" PowerMac4,4" encode-string " MacRISC" encode-string encode+ " MacRISC2" encode-string encode+ " MacRISC3" encode-string encode+ " Power Macintosh" encode-string encode+ " compatible" property
unselect
'
# Enable use of nvramrc on boot. Change to "false" if you want to disable again. Or just clear/reset nvram.
sudo nvram "use-nvramrc?"=true
echo done.

 

[3lectr1cPPC]

I’ll give that a go later, than you!

 

[Chopsticks]

I used to use a tool called LeopardAssist that allowed you to do this using a GUI (works in tiger too), but I might save this script for future use.
fwiw the OS X startup control panel appears to check for what version of MacRISC support is listed in open firmware. Enabling these options in nvram basically just tells OS X the cpu supports OS9 booting thus showing up in the startup disk preference pane.
in case anyone is wondering how the Ross v9 CD boots up without messing around with open firmware, they basicuslly hacked the macOS rom file to add in the missing support feature/requirements. In fact interestingly it will even boot off a hdd with no macOS 9 disk driver partition as they baked that in too.

 

[Thorhall]

What I did is write a shell script using the bless command. You need to set the OS9 drive as the bootable disk in startup disk preferences if it also contains an OS X install, then run the shell script to bless os 9 and finally reboot from the Apple menu and it will launch straight in to os 9.

 

[Chopsticks]

just re-read the OP and in regards to it taking ages to finishing scanning when you use the open firmware boot picker its because the boot picker also searcher for Netboot devices and will do so regardless if you are connected to a lan or not. my understanding its it its listening for the available service and had a long timeout before giving up. so while using the script to enable os 9 in the OS X boot picker id also recommend booting into Open Firmware and running the following command:

setenv skip-netboot? true

this will disable it searching for network boot shares and just check the typical IDE/SCSI/Firewire bus's, doing this will let you select a drive in the boot quicker in a couple seconds rather then 20-30 seconds. I still 100% recommend running that script posted by @bloedmage but at least for me I've found it handy speeding up the boot picker as both my fall back method and also because I use it often to select other boot media during my system hacking projects

 

[3lectr1cPPC]

Thanks for the advice folks!

 

[caver01]

I am finally getting my own eMac (late model 1GHz, ATI) up and running with dual/triple boot and this thread has helped mine see the OS9 boot option in the startup control panel under Sorbet Leopard, but the script did not make a difference when used in Panther.

I plan to update my Panther partition anyway--probably to Tiger--but needed it to do the Bluetooth Firmware Update 1.2 on my D-link DBT-120. Having the boot option for OS9 now is great. Thanks!

One thing that was a challenge (best for another thread perhaps) is that I still needed to install OS9 drivers on the partition for that OS despite using the OS9Lives CD @Chopsticks mentioned above. That CD boots, but I could not get it installed without the HDD drivers. Maybe I could have simply dragged-and-dropped? Anyway, OS9 drivers is a deep rabbit hole, but worth mentioning here.

 

[DarthNvader]

Elliot outdid himself with the hack to enable booting from disks without OS 9 drivers.

The reason for it was to allow OS 9 booting for people who did not want to format their drive.

He fixed a bug in my hacked ATI drivers to, so you don't need the hacked drivers for the G4 Mini, I'm not sure he fixed it for the iBook G4's and the eMacs with Radeon 9200's tho....

 

[Mk.558]

ya those blokes who did that Mac OS 9 stuff need a medal or something. Not many people want to do that these days and you have to know a lot of really esoteric stuff to do that.

Using OS 9 on my G4 Mac mini helped clear out a lot of desk space versus the iMac G4. The CD drive doesn't work in OS 9, mouse doesn't work requiring reboots until it does from time to time, but I use OS 9 just often enough that's not really much of a bother.

If you're using OS 9 for AppleShare reasons, certain "unsupported" Macs can boot earlier versions of OS X. Mine will boot 10.2.7 unofficially, handy for when you need OS X for something but also AppleShare stuff.

 

[DarthNvader]

The CD drive doesn't work in OS 9,

You mean CD burning doesn't work?

As far as I know the CD/DVD drive works just fine

mouse doesn't work requiring reboots until it does from time to time, but I use OS 9 just often enough that's not really much of a bother.Y

The mouse hang was the drivers I hacked for the R9200, you should update the Mac OS ROM file to the one that uses the standard ATI drivers without my hacked drivers. Elliot patched the device ID in that ROM to fix the mouse hang issue.

 

[Mk.558]

Doesn't work as in I put in a disc, it works for a bit then spits it back out without anything the desktop.

I'll have to look into the Mac OS ROM file. ...Which one do I need?