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benwild_33

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 15, 2016
165
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Just got my Powerbook G4 Ti 1GHz running in OS9 but I need to install video drivers, I downloaded the 8500 installer and the 2005 update but after unpacking them the just come up as PC icons and I cant run them. I'm guessing I'm doing something wrong, I'm a bit of an OS9 beginner. Any ideas?
 
Figured it out, OS9 doesn't like USB drives very much, burned them to a CD and they worked!
 
Figured it out, OS9 doesn't like USB drives very much, burned them to a CD and they worked!
I doubt it's actual USB thumb drives, but more the formatting.

OS 9 and up to around OS X 10.5 has an internal file system Apple calls Apple Double.

You have a resource fork and you have a data fork. The resource fork stores the info about a file so that when you double-click on it, it opens in the correct app. The data fork stores the actual data.

You don't see this stuff in the background because Apple hides it from you. If you turn on invisibles though you can see all the little correcsponding files that equate to the resource fork.

PC on the other hand has ONE fork. It's the data fork and that's it. PC's rely on three letter filename extensions to know which app to open your file in.

Most USB thumb drives, especially if you do not reformat them, come stock with FAT-32 formatting. FAT-32 does NOT support Apple Double. So assuming this is the case with your USB drive, when you copied this file it lost the association with the resource fork.

Hence when unpacking it - you got PC icons.

Burning the file via CD kept the resource forks.

Apple Double was the way Apple gave Mac users an advantage in that they did not have to add an extension to their filenames. But it also made it difficult for these old Mac users to transition to later version of OS X as Apple began to phase out resource forks.

PC users on the other hand would get pissed off when browsing server shares because Apple Double meant that all these small little files littered the share everywhere. Mac users couldn't see them but PC users could.

Sorry. Long winded explanation for why what you did worked. :)
 
I doubt it's actual USB thumb drives, but more the formatting.

OS 9 and up to around OS X 10.5 has an internal file system Apple calls Apple Double.

You have a resource fork and you have a data fork. The resource fork stores the info about a file so that when you double-click on it, it opens in the correct app. The data fork stores the actual data.

You don't see this stuff in the background because Apple hides it from you. If you turn on invisibles though you can see all the little correcsponding files that equate to the resource fork.

PC on the other hand has ONE fork. It's the data fork and that's it. PC's rely on three letter filename extensions to know which app to open your file in.

Most USB thumb drives, especially if you do not reformat them, come stock with FAT-32 formatting. FAT-32 does NOT support Apple Double. So assuming this is the case with your USB drive, when you copied this file it lost the association with the resource fork.

Hence when unpacking it - you got PC icons.

Burning the file via CD kept the resource forks.

Apple Double was the way Apple gave Mac users an advantage in that they did not have to add an extension to their filenames. But it also made it difficult for these old Mac users to transition to later version of OS X as Apple began to phase out resource forks.

PC users on the other hand would get pissed off when browsing server shares because Apple Double meant that all these small little files littered the share everywhere. Mac users couldn't see them but PC users could.

Sorry. Long winded explanation for why what you did worked. :)

Thank you for the explanation, I’ll get an old usb drive and format it on my other powerbook g4, this drive was formatted on a Mac running Sierra. Unfortunately the drivers I installed still haven’t given me hardware acceleration on my mobility Radeon 9000, I think I’ll have to find the original os9 install image online.
 
Thank you for the explanation, I’ll get an old usb drive and format it on my other powerbook g4, this drive was formatted on a Mac running Sierra. Unfortunately the drivers I installed still haven’t given me hardware acceleration on my mobility Radeon 9000, I think I’ll have to find the original os9 install image online.
Yeah, the drive probably got formatted as MBR/ExFat or something similar.

Format it as APM/HFS+.
 
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I doubt it's actual USB thumb drives, but more the formatting.

OS 9 and up to around OS X 10.5 has an internal file system Apple calls Apple Double.

You have a resource fork and you have a data fork. The resource fork stores the info about a file so that when you double-click on it, it opens in the correct app. The data fork stores the actual data.

You don't see this stuff in the background because Apple hides it from you. If you turn on invisibles though you can see all the little correcsponding files that equate to the resource fork.

PC on the other hand has ONE fork. It's the data fork and that's it. PC's rely on three letter filename extensions to know which app to open your file in.

Most USB thumb drives, especially if you do not reformat them, come stock with FAT-32 formatting. FAT-32 does NOT support Apple Double. So assuming this is the case with your USB drive, when you copied this file it lost the association with the resource fork.

Hence when unpacking it - you got PC icons.

Burning the file via CD kept the resource forks.

Apple Double was the way Apple gave Mac users an advantage in that they did not have to add an extension to their filenames. But it also made it difficult for these old Mac users to transition to later version of OS X as Apple began to phase out resource forks.

PC users on the other hand would get pissed off when browsing server shares because Apple Double meant that all these small little files littered the share everywhere. Mac users couldn't see them but PC users could.

Sorry. Long winded explanation for why what you did worked. :)
Good post! I learnt a bit here.:)
 
Just got my Powerbook G4 Ti 1GHz running in OS9 but I need to install video drivers, I downloaded the 8500 installer and the 2005 update but after unpacking them the just come up as PC icons and I cant run them. I'm guessing I'm doing something wrong, I'm a bit of an OS9 beginner. Any ideas?

Hi, please would you mind sharing where you got that 8500 installer and 2005 update ? I have a Ti 1Ghz (mmhh... I have 3 in fact) too and don't think I did the upgrade...
 
Hi, please would you mind sharing where you got that 8500 installer and 2005 update ? I have a Ti 1Ghz (mmhh... I have 3 in fact) too and don't think I did the upgrade...
The OS9 image for your TiBook is on MG. It should contain all the correct drivers and presets.
 
Sorry missed all the replies on here for some reason, I got it working last night. You can tell when it has no video acceleration as it leaves you in 256 colours. I got the 8500 installer to work but its not compatible with the mobile version of the radeon 9000. What I did in the end was download the original install DVD (I cant link the download here but it was from MG) and that installs OSX10.2 and then gives the option to install OS9, the copy of OS9 it installs works just fine so it might be worth making a copy of it's extensions folder. I found this version of OS9 runs a lot better than the universal one I was running anyway as it has less extensions.
 
There is an upload on MG of just the OS9 part of the original install media and there is a link from the page of the original install media. It saves on bandwidth on downloading and you don't have to go through the time wasting rigmarole of installing Jaguar first just to get at OS9.
 
There is an upload on MG of just the OS9 part of the original install media and there is a link from the page of the original install media. It saves on bandwidth on downloading and you don't have to go through the time wasting rigmarole of installing Jaguar first just to get at OS9.

I did see that one but it had trouble cloning the toast format file on to my system disk, I figured I may as well install jaguar for simplicity plus I've never used it.
 
I did see that one but it had trouble cloning the toast format file on to my system disk, I figured I may as well install jaguar for simplicity plus I've never used it.
There is no cloning of OS9 volumes needed. Cloning is for OSX only. Either burn to CD and boot from it or open the Toast image in OSX and drag and drop 3 files on the disk onto your hard drive. That was explained on MG.
 
You have a resource fork and you have a data fork. The resource fork stores the info about a file so that when you double-click on it, it opens in the correct app. The data fork stores the actual data.

You don't see this stuff in the background because Apple hides it from you. If you turn on invisibles though you can see all the little correcsponding files that equate to the resource fork.

Here's another fun consequence from that.

Let's say you type up a file with some fancy formatting in Nisus writer or even Word Perfect or Word for Mac OS.

Then, go to a PC and try open the file in Word or even Wordpad of the same era. Regardless of where the document was written, you can open it as an ASCII file even though you'll lose the formatting.

This still works to this day if you try to open an old Nisus file in the current version of Nisus.
 
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