Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
iMac G4 Dual Boot
- Thread starter Summez
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
You sure can! Just partition the drive in Leopard and then while installing the other OSes, select the partition you made. Name them something easy like "Panther HD" or "Tiger HD" so that you know what OS to install to each partition you make.
Maybe I'm wrong, but as far as I understood changing the partitions (number/size) will reformat the whole disk and your previous Leopard-partition/installation get's lost. So you'll need a proper backup/reinstall previous/after partitioning the disk. With OS X / intel changing the portions do not harm existing installations.
I hope someone will proove me wrong... (I also want to create another partition on my Clamshell but currently I don't like to hassle around with Backup-Partitioning-Restore, even if I recently mirrored that specific Clamshell/Tiger-Book onto another Clamshell. I'd go for SuperDuper! and FireWire-Backup, maybe onto another PPC in Target-mode.
Leopard and above has live-partition adjusting, meaning you can adjust and resize partitions while in the OS without losing everything. In tiger and below, redoing partitions erases everything, hence why I said in my reply above that if you do it through Leopard, you won't lose everything (made this mistake in the past...).
Ha, that's good to know. Many thanks for that information. Does it still work, if you've chosen "Classic-Support" during first setup? And can you partition a Tiger-formated drive running in Target-mode from a Leopard-system without loosing the previous partition's data?
Classic-support? Is that the same as OS 9 drivers? If so, no, you cannot resize or split partitions. As far as I know, you should be able to repartition a HDD created in Tiger if it's plugged into a Leopard Mac via SATA, IDE/PATA, USB, or over TDM.
Last edited:
That really sounds good!. Gonna try this with my Clamshell. I had been really disappointed after I forgot to create more than one partition on that Book/Tiger and got the message, that changing of Partitions will lead to the loss of all respective data.
It's really nice to get deeper and deeper into details and make the ensemble of OS9/OSX/PPC/intel work together!
@Gamer9430 It actually spends on the size of the drive. So far, the smallest "big" drive that I have been able to test live partitioning in Leopard is 60GB. It works on that drive, but the smaller 30GB drive in my TiBook does not allow this.
Ok then I guess anything under 40GB won't work, I had to use a Tiger DVD to partition it, and even then, the leopard partition got erased
That's because Tiger still will erase everything when redoing partitions. Leopard will not.
[doublepost=1457964667][/doublepost]I'm sorry... I made a mistake, if you have the OS 9/classic mode drivers installed, you CANNOT split and resize partitions. Thanks @LightBulbFun for letting me know about that.
Sorry for the thread revival. There is no size limitation for live partitioning in OS X. A partitions cannot be adjusted if the Classic Support or OS 9 drivers are installed without first erasing the entire disk. Live partitioning first appeared in a later version of Tiger, 10.4.8 I think, probably because of Boot Camp's need to easily partition the drive to install Windows.