Mysterious new tiny partiton?

That's a little odd. I'd expect to see that on a Windows machine... not an old Mac. However, it's a possibility that it has something to do with the fact that the PowerMac 9500 shipped with a PowerPC 604 processor which doesn't support 9.2 and later. You could try zapping PRAM [or boot into Open FirmWare, and type init-nvram] to see if that helps matters.

If this doesn't help things, you might want to look into DiskWarrior; that's fixed every hard drive problem I've ever had on a Mac. Latest for OS 9 is 2.1.1, I believe. I could actually send the file to you in a couple weeks when I get home, if you wanted.. I think you'd probably have trouble finding a DW version that old for sale.

Disk First Aid sucks. As I understand it, it cleans up some of the minor mess-ups OS 9.2 makes on a regular basis, but not much else... which in older versions of the Mac OS it did pretty much nothing, since any issues you had were more serious than it could handle.

I assume these are all HFS+ disks.

I also assume they were formatted under OS 9.2 or earlier, not OS X... that can cause some problems sometimes.

I wouldn't say upgrading/maintaining an 8500 is a waste of time/money (unless it's money you really don't have). I just eBayed a PowerMac 9600 for $10 (plus a ridiculous $45 S&H); 288 MB RAM, OS 9.1, 200 MHz 604e, some small HDD. I've got three or four G3 and G4 CPUs lying around... not sure if I can buy an adapter or if I'd need to buy a daughtercard with CPU to upgrade it... two PCI ATA/133 cards and a free 6 GB drive as well as a few CD-ROM drives and a spare CRT, so I can have some fun messing around with that. Bought a B&W G3 too, for $1.29, haha.

Actually, do you know if there are cheap adapters I can plug a G3 or G4 CPU into so that I can upgrade the 9600? Or would I need to buy the whole thing? If that's the case I'm not going to bother. Would be a pain to have a 200 MHz CPU though. I'd probably be happy enough with a 300 or 350 MHz 604ev though, lol.

Oh, P.S., you might have better luck at the Apple Discussion Forums under Pre-G3 computers.... people who have 8500s might know about this.

 

Check out Other World Computing

I used to have a PM8500 and a PM9600 and donated both to the local high school. The 8500 has a G3 500mghtz chip, and the 9600 has a G4 800mghtz chip. They are both still running OSX Tiger. If you eventually need something a little more modern you can install Tiger, and still run 9.2 in classic mode (9.2 booting is not supported for pre-G3 with out a helper program). I have a lot of experience in installing OSX on to those computers. First go to Other World Computing and pick up a copy of Xpostfacto (http://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/), then read their installation instructions. It also has the 9.2 helper there too. I bought an IDE/ATA card for the 8500 to put some bigger hard drives into it, but the bus speed was so slow it stuttered during any audio playback, video was un-bearable. I then found some large SCSI discs and they worked fine, and kept the card for the DVD player (which is required for the Tiger install disc). The hard drives did have to be formatted HFS+. The installation on the 9600 required me to clone the OS and do a Bless Old World Disc in Carbon Copy Cloner for me to install on my WD caviar drive (some bug with the card ,WD drive and XPostfacto) worked fine on my other Segate drive. The bus was fast enough to play audio and some video with out stuttering from the IDE/ATA card (Tempo Trio). Have fun! Those computers are still working great as audio machines & word processing for the high school drama department. I’m not sure about the mysterious partitioning, but my systems were rock solid. Hope this helps.

 

I don't know of any adapters, but to upgrade the 9600 you may have to look for an upgrade card for it, I think the highest you can go is 900 mghtz G3 (powerforce?)or a 800 mghtz G4 (sonnet). The Mac changed to the ZIF socket the next year, as you may know, with the Beige G3, and was not backwards compatible, to my knowledge.