Re: Installing OS9 to G4 MDD 1.25Ghz

On 2024-10-04 07:07:00 +0000, scole said:

 My main vintage Mac for many years has been this wonderful G4 MDD
1.25Ghz (single processor, not the dual processor version). As the last
Mac capable of natively booting OS9, it is an absolute beast of a
machine for the system (in fairness, OS9 runs great on a lot of older,
slower machines, too; I had a Snow iMac G3 that was a beautiful OS9
experience), and I get a lot of enjoyment out of it.
 I have had cause to reinstall OS9 to it twice this year, and each time
it has been painful. The first time was a long overdue reinstall to
tidy up a decade's worth of careless use, so the pain felt worth it in
the end, but the most recent (this week) was to fix a major system
error caused by a simple mistake, and I became quite frustrated at what
a nuisance it is to get OS9 reinstalled.
 Some context; I do not have OSX installed on this machine, nor do I
want to have it on here. I have a Sonnet Tempo SATA PCI card that has
two 128GB SSDs hooked to it, one of which is carved into three
partitions, and one of those partitions is my OS9 boot drive. When
everything is running smoothly, this results in a lightning-fast and
silent machine (I replaced all the internal fans a long time ago with
Silenx ones).
 There is no OS9 retail CD that will boot this machine. The original
install media that came with it (which I do not have) was a 4 CD set,
with an OS9 disk image on one of them; that is on the Garden at
<http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/mac-os-922-powermac-g4-mdd>.
 To use that disk image, you need to be booted into OSX, which I don't
have. OK, I figured, the first time I had to reinstall, how about I use
my iMac G5 and have the MDD in FireWire Target Mode? No dice, Target
Mode would not see the SSDs on the PCI card. I went Googling for any
other way of doing it but eventually I dug out an old hard drive from
my parts bin that I knew had some early flavour of OSX on and stuck
that in the MDD.
 It booted, painfully slowly, to a very congested install of Panther
(clearly, the machine I had pulled that drive from belonged to a web
designer 20 years ago and he was sloppy as hell when it came to
managing his workspace...) but I was able to download the OS9 dmg,
mount it, and drag/drop the contents to the formatted SSD boot
partition. Setting that as the startup disk and restarting, I was
pleased to see OS9 booting (there was some further messing around with
disabling some video card extensions to actually make it work properly,
but that was simple enough).
 Second reinstall came round this week and I knew the process, but it
was still a hellish drag to open up the computer, connect the OSX
drive, boot to that (very slowly again... I subsequently did a fresh
install of Tiger to it so I have a cleaner OSX to boot into in the
future), and then mount and drag and drop. There has to be a simpler
way, right? I can't find any hacked bootable 9.2.2 installer that would
make my life simpler and negate the need  for OSX. Anyone have any
ideas or can point me in the right direction?
 I had a similar pantomime when reinstalling OS9 to an iMac G4 a few
years ago, but at least that did have bootable (albeit
machine-specific) OS9 media available that I was eventually able to
source. I get why Apple supplied install media tailored for each
machine, but it's a monumental pain in the arse, life would be so much
simpler if they'd continued to release generic retail versions that
would work on all machines.

The machine-specific install discs are those that ship with the computer, but there are also machine-independent retail discs for those upgrading their existing computers version of Mac OS.