upgrading a bondi blue imac

[pzler]

my main and newest mac, a bondi blue 233mhz imac has worked well for me for a long time now. but i decided that i really need to upgrade it if i want to keep it going for a few more years of loyal service.

I allready upgraded the ram to some extend, but maybe i will upgrade it further. i have learned how to do this so that isn't a problem. i could use some help with some other questions tho.

i want to get a bigger hard drive. the original 4gb drive is just to small and sluggish. can anyone tell me what i need to consider when looking for a new hard drive. i'm a huge noob when it comes to this and i have no idea what kind of drives are compatible.

the other thing i was planning to do is make my mac a dual boot system. i want to be able to boot os x and os 9 seperately because sometimes i simply need os x for newer programs but i don't want to slow down the computer to much most of the time when i'm simply using software that runs on os 9 (or classic mode)

I'm also considering getting yellow dog linux linux on it so i can choose between 3 operating systems. that way i could get a lot more out of my old imac.

Does anyone know how i can set up a dual boot system like this?

and my third question. does anyone have some other ideas to get more out of my imac? please keep in mind that it has to be economically viable. and NO, i not buying a new computer any time soon.

 

[Bunsen]

Hard drives: only recognises up to 128GB of any drive. You can put a larger drive on if you have one, but you'll only see the first 128GB. Must be ATA (parallel ATA or PATA) and not SATA (serial ATA)

Dual boot: OS X must be in the first partition of the drive, and that partition must be less than 8GB in size. You can either have OS 9 in the same partition or a separate one. I like to have it in a separate one: if the OS X partition gets borked, you can boot from OS 9 to repair it.

If you want linux as well, you'll need a separate partition or two for that. See the yellowdog website for a guide.

You can put a 333MHz CPU module from another iMac into it. These can be obtained from ebay pretty reasonably.