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Rethinking my bridge/server setup

I see, thanks for the information. I’m going to forego the Mac OS 9 installations for now since it’s just too much hassle for my needs. I’m relieved that the PowerMac 8600 isn’t having hardware issues since I just spent more than I should have for a refurbished power supply for it. I’m really not too concerned with the others but it’s good to know that the issue isn’t necessarily hardware problems.
 
Try disabling as many Extensions and Control Panels as possible and see if the system gets stable
These are fresh installs of the Mac OS without any third party extension installed. However I do understand that even that means there are third party components involved in a fresh install. I tried what you suggested in the iMac dv with base Mac OS 9.0.4 using extensions Manager, yielding the same results.
 
Regarding the disabling on extensions and control panels and using a base Mac OS set in Extensions Manager, the Mac would hardly be useful if I cannot have the entire Mac OS running plus third party extensions. It's just disturbing to me that an OS that was pre-installed and released for a specific Mac has software issues on said Mac and causes bus issues. I'm going to not let it get me too disturbed though.

Regarding the Power Macintosh 8600 I have. I got the refurbished power supply because I had a suspicion that more was going on beside software problems because of the noise it was making. Prior to running it with the newly obtained power supply, every supported OS for this Mac threw up a dreaded bus error and I had to pull the plug because even the power button failed to shut it down and the keyboard reset sequence brought it back to the same dreaded bus error on reboot. After installing the refurbished power supply, the Power Macintosh installs and boot every OS supported including Mac OS 9.0. But, Mac OS 9.0 has serious issues that are so overwhelming that it's not useful.

I'm guessing in this case the bus error was a hardware issue? Perhaps a section of the board or component wasn't getting the correct or any current?

Another observation was the method and version of Drive Setup used to format the drive that you are using to install Mac OS 9 onto. There are versions out there that will format the drive and make it seem like everything is fine but once you try to install Mac OS 9 onto the volume it causes the dreaded bus error on reboot. Is there any rhyme or reason to any of this? is this kind of thing documented someplace. You know, as reference so that in the event somebody else that tries this in 2 years will not need to go through this forum or ask silly questions about old equipment that has probably been observed before by many but not exactly broken down and pin pointed to a specific cause?
 
FWIW, a modern Linux or NetBSD machine running netatalk 4.x is arguably a better and more reliable bridge machine for old Macs, than an old Mac with OS9.

(And yes, as a netatalk maintainer I am biased.)
 
FWIW, a modern Linux or NetBSD machine running netatalk 4.x is arguably a better and more reliable bridge machine for old Macs, than an old Mac with OS9.
I'm sure it is a better and more arguably a more reliable bridge but it doesn't answer the bus error question.

Could I mount existing Mac dmg files with a setup like that and share them to 68k Mac OS clients? Not a smart ass question I really know very little about netatalk so I'll need to do some reading. Could I share ip connection via serial port to local compact Macs with a modern Linux or NetBSD machine?

I'm just trying to accomplish the task with what I have on hand as I don't plan on buying any more hardware
 
Another assumption I had was based off of the idea that if the hard disk you are using to install macOS 9 onto was ever used in a Mac and had been formatted and setup with GUID partition map and had an invisible partition such as a restore partition, you would have to zero the drive using the version of Disk Utility that created it. Once it was zeroed you shut it down without creating a new volume. Then you allow Mac OS 9’s drive setup to format the disk for a Mac OS installation. This should result in no bus errors. If it’s not an Apple shipped drive then when doing the installation uncheck the box that allows the updating of the disk driver.
 
I'm sure it is a better and more arguably a more reliable bridge but it doesn't answer the bus error question.

Could I mount existing Mac dmg files with a setup like that and share them to 68k Mac OS clients? Not a smart ass question I really know very little about netatalk so I'll need to do some reading.
What you can do is to mount the shared netatalk volume on any macOS or OSX machine, extract whatever data you want from dmg files and copy them onto the shared volume from where the 68k Macs can access them.

Could I share ip connection via serial port to local compact Macs with a modern Linux or NetBSD machine?
You can accomplish this with something like the TashTalk, which is created by a community member. https://github.com/lampmerchant/tashtalk
 
Because Legacy Mac OS limits the size of Macintosh volume access, I decided to have multiple 2 GB archive partitions organized to hold the installers of all my archived programs and such. So a Mac running System 6 or 7 can access sever shares organized by topic. I really don't want to reorganize my archive for another OS. I'm happy to leave my setup the way it is for now. I have Mac OS X Server 10.2.8 on the iMac dv and all clients can access what is shared. I just had a question about the bus errors and OS 9 and the reliability of using the patched OS 9 on the G4 Mac Mini.
 
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