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Dual-booting Leopard and OS 9 on a G4 mini

Strategia

Strategia

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 26, 2019
88
145
Hi all,
I sought to dual-boot OS 9 and Leopard using the MacOS9Lives ISO image on one partition. Both operating systems installed successfully and I was able to get OS 9 to work, but upon installing Leopard the Startup Disk preference pane failed to detect OS 9.

Using Open Firmware I manually booted the Mac OS ROM. While OS 9 displayed the Happy Mac, it otherwise could not go on further. After restarting again, Leopard seemed to hang after attempting to terminate IOUSBCompositeDevice (which is odd considering it appeared even without any USB devices plugged). While it does not kernel panic, using verbose mode Leopard claims it is "Still waiting for root device".

My guess is that the installation of Leopard removed the OS 9 Disk Drivers (as the option to enable those drivers was hidden due to OS 9 never being officially supported on the G4 mini), but that still does not explain why Leopard fails to boot. Also of note is that before initiating the Leopard installation, I manually converted the volume from HFS+ to HFS+ (Journaled). Should I attempt reinstalling OS 9 and Leopard without enabling journaling? Or perhaps I could try dual-booting OS 9 and Tiger followed by upgrading to Leopard.
 
Strategia said:
Hi all,
I sought to dual-boot OS 9 and Leopard using the MacOS9Lives ISO image on one partition. Both operating systems installed successfully and I was able to get OS 9 to work, but upon installing Leopard the Startup Disk preference pane failed to detect OS 9.

Using Open Firmware I manually booted the Mac OS ROM. While OS 9 displayed the Happy Mac, it otherwise could not go on further. After restarting again, Leopard seemed to hang after attempting to terminate IOUSBCompositeDevice (which is odd considering it appeared even without any USB devices plugged). While it does not kernel panic, using verbose mode Leopard claims it is "Still waiting for root device".

My guess is that the installation of Leopard removed the OS 9 Disk Drivers (as the option to enable those drivers were hidden due to OS 9 never being officially supported on the G4 mini), but that still does not explain why Leopard fails to boot. Also of note is that before initiating the Leopard installation, I manually converted the volume from HFS+ to HFS+ (Journaled). Should I attempt reinstalling OS 9 and Leopard without enabling journaling? Or perhaps I could try dual-booting OS 9 and Tiger followed by upgrading to Leopard.
Click to expand...
I would definitely not recommend trying to get Leopard and 9 to share a partition. Leopard doesn't like to play nice with 9, and if you're going to play with OSX and OS 9 on the same system, you're really going to want to either let OS 9 set up the partitions and then not let Leopard do anything to the one you're putting it on, or more easily, use Tiger to set everything up, as its disk utility supports OS 9 disk drivers. I don't actually know what that means, but 9 doesn't play nice without it, and it's really easy to break with Leopard or Linux.

I wouldn't rule out being able to set it all up the way you want, but you're going to have much less of a headache if you keep them on separate partitions. That's not to say there won't be other headaches, but this is just part of what you have to deal with to keep OS 9 alive.
 
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repairedCheese said:
I would definitely not recommend trying to get Leopard and 9 to share a partition. Leopard doesn't like to play nice with 9, and if you're going to play with OSX and OS 9 on the same system, you're really going to want to either let OS 9 set up the partitions and then not let Leopard do anything to the one you're putting it on, or more easily, use Tiger to set everything up, as its disk utility supports OS 9 disk drivers. I don't actually know what that means, but 9 doesn't play nice without it, and it's really easy to break with Leopard or Linux.

I wouldn't rule out being able to set it all up the way you want, but you're going to have much less of a headache if you keep them on separate partitions. That's not to say there won't be other headaches, but this is just part of what you have to deal with to keep OS 9 alive.
Click to expand...
The option to install OS9 drivers is still there in Leopard (even appears in disk utility as checked once activated).
==Step 1: Installing Mac OS X==
I’m dual booting Mac OS X 10.5.6 so I put in the DVD I burned and let it boot.

Once the installer boots, I agreed to the license agreement and selected Terminal from the Utilities button within the Menu Bar at the top. I am partitioning from within Terminal and not with Disk Utility. This is because the "Install Mac OS 9 Drivers" option in Disk Utility is not available to PPC Mac's that can not officially boot Mac OS 9. In Terminal, I executed this command:

diskutil partitonDisk /dev/disk0 OS9Drivers HFS+ macos9 35G JHFS+ macosx 35G
Click to expand...
 
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alex_free said:
The option to install OS9 drivers is still there in Leopard (even appears in disk utility as checked once activated).
Click to expand...
To be fair, most of the time I've broken OS 9 is when I've needed to resize the partitions. Nothing seems to like to keep OS 9 drivers around when you do that.
 
alex_free said:

This was what I did to dual boot both, same HDD but different partitions.
Click to expand...
repairedCheese said:
I would definitely not recommend trying to get Leopard and 9 to share a partition. Leopard doesn't like to play nice with 9, and if you're going to play with OSX and OS 9 on the same system, you're really going to want to either let OS 9 set up the partitions and then not let Leopard do anything to the one you're putting it on, or more easily, use Tiger to set everything up, as its disk utility supports OS 9 disk drivers. I don't actually know what that means, but 9 doesn't play nice without it, and it's really easy to break with Leopard or Linux.

I wouldn't rule out being able to set it all up the way you want, but you're going to have much less of a headache if you keep them on separate partitions. That's not to say there won't be other headaches, but this is just part of what you have to deal with to keep OS 9 alive.
Click to expand...
Thank you all for your advice. I will try a variation of alex_free's tutorial but with using one partition. If that fails, I can settle for using two partitions. Do you know if OS 9 can work off journaled volumes?
 
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Strategia said:
Thank you all for your advice. I will try a variation of alex_free's tutorial but with using one partition. If that fails, I can settle for using two partitions. Do you know if OS 9 can work off journaled volumes?
Click to expand...
Probably, OS 9 can definitely mount/read/write/100% use my external SATA 500GB HDD using a SATA2USB adapter which is JHFS+. I would still start with Leopard, then copy OS9 like in the tutorial but to the same Leopard partition.
 
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Strategia said:
Do you know if OS 9 can work off journaled volumes?
Click to expand...
It should be able to. I've managed what you're trying with Tiger, and while it does have its quirks, like OS 9 not showing up on the boot picker, it should work on Journaled HFS+
 
alex_free said:
Probably, OS 9 can definitely mount/read/write/100% use my external SATA 500GB HDD using a SATA2USB adapter which is JHFS+. I would still start with Leopard, then copy OS9 like in the tutorial but to the same Leopard partition.
Click to expand...
Oh yes, Leopard is probably going to play a lot nicer with OS 9 forced on after, than 9 would if you install Leopard next to it, without a doubt.
 
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I installed Leopard followed by OS 9. 9 detected both itself and OS X in the Startup Disk preference pane. I selected Leopard as my startup disk, but Leopard's equivalent to Startup Disk was unable to detect OS 9. I once more tried manually booting the ROM, but I was stuck at the Happy Mac like before. I wonder if it would be possible to force Leopard to see OS 9 in Startup Disk.
IMG_0821.JPG
 
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Strategia said:
I installed Leopard followed by OS 9. 9 detected both itself and OS X in the Startup Disk preference pane. I selected Leopard as my startup disk, but Leopard's equivalent to Startup Disk was unable to detect OS 9. I once more tried manually booting the ROM, but I was stuck at the Happy Mac like before. I wonder if it would be possible to force Leopard to see OS 9 in Startup Disk.View attachment 1707033
Click to expand...
Cool, it works.

What I do is boot into open firmware at startup, and then execute the 'multi-boot' command to pull up the OS switcher which sees Mac OS 9 as in the tutorial.

I think there is some program that fakes the mac model which allows you to use Leopard's startup disk functionality for OS 9.
 
alex_free said:
Cool, it works.

What I do is boot into open firmware at startup, and then execute the 'multi-boot' command to pull up the OS switcher which sees Mac OS 9 as in the tutorial.

I think there is some program that fakes the mac model which allows you to use Leopard's startup disk functionality for OS 9.
Click to expand...
No dice. It only sees Leopard. Do you happen by chance to know what the name of the program is?
 
I read the comments on alex_free's MacOS9Lives thread more thoroughly. Using IdentityTool, you can enable OS 9 booting from the Startup Disk pane of a Mac officially unable to boot it. Add the MacRISC and MacRISC2 flags to allow for both OS 9 and Leopard to boot with this method. This is the end result!
IMG_0823.JPG
 
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