Re: Rebuilding Power Macintosh 9600

In article <290920240831355501%vintageapplemac@gmail.com>, scole
<vintageapplemac@gmail.com> wrote:

 
Today's job will be to get a copy of FWB onto a Zip disk and see if I
can mount into that while booted into the OS9 CD. If so, I should be
able to work with the SD card hard drive. If not, I will think again!

Well, this did work, it is possible to mount a Zip disk while booted
into the OS9 retail CD, but I also managed to kill the system on my MDD
G4 while getting the software onto the Zip...

I thought it'd be simple, drag and drop FWB to the zip but no dice, so
I ran the FWB installer with the Zip disk as the target, and then
figured I'd do the same with Norton Tools just so I had another option
when I sneakernetted the Zip round to the 9600. But Norton didn't like
that, so I ran the Norton installer with the MDD's RAM disk as the
target (logic was I didn't want it actually installed on this machine)
and then dragged/dropped it to the Zip and all seemed well.

The problems began when I shut down the MDD, which wiped the RAM disk;
when I next booted it a few hours later there was a system error as
extensions loaded. Hours of hunting for conflicts and disabling
extensions later, I was no closer to definitively identifying exactly
what the problem was, but there were scraps of the Norton install on my
system drive and my hunch was that this was the issue; where most of
the Norton install had been wiped off the RAM disk, these scraps were
causing problems. I lost my temper with it in the end and decided to
simply wipe the partition and reinstall OS9, but that's a whole
different story; OS9 installation on a G4 MDD 1.25Ghz FW400 machine is
a pain in the arse! I'll make a post on that later...

Anyway, where I'm at with the 9600 is that I have the SD card formatted
with FWB (it only allowed a single 2GB partition, on a 128GB card... I
need to get to the bottom of how I can make multiple partitions) and
have 9.0.4 installed and reliably booting. Next step will be to get a
7.6.1 installer onto that machine and install that to a second drive,
which I can then juggle to my intended main drive (the SD card) when
I've figured out partitioning it correctly.

Once that is all done, then the upgrades can begin and I can build my
monster!