OS 9 expertise needed please :)

[G4Simon]

Hi

Ive got an old G4 933 quicksilver running OS9.2.2 which I use with an old Digidesign Protools rig for music production.

I'm considering getting a dual 1.25 MDD (FW400) to give me a bit more speed and RAM etc.

My question is:
Is it possible to just simply swap the drives over and have the dual 1.25 run on the drive from the old quicksilver 933 or is there different boot ROMs and other incombatibilities?

thanks in advance for any help

 

[RedCroissant]

Hi

Ive got an old G4 933 quicksilver running OS9.2.2 which I use with an old Digidesign Protools rig for music production.

I'm considering getting a dual 1.25 MDD (FW400) to give me a bit more speed and RAM etc.

My question is:
Is it possible to just simply swap the drives over and have the dual 1.25 run on the drive from the old quicksilver 933 or is there different boot ROMs and other incombatibilities?

thanks in advance for any help

Looking at the specs for both of them, I don't see any issue doing that. Both machines ship with 9.2.2. , 10.1.2/10.2. So because the MDD will boot 9.2.2 and they both rely on open firmware along with the ATA-100 being backwards compatible with the ATA-66 that your QS is running, I think the switch will be fine and you should be up and running fairly quickly.

The only "problem" I foresee with this is that you will not get any RAM increase because even though the max RAM for the MDD is 2GB, only 1.5GB will be recognized when booting into OS 9. The RAM is locked at a higher MHz in the MDD but the overall RAM amount will not change. as long as you are using OS 9.

 

[G4Simon]

Thanks for the reply Red.

A friend mentioned a problem with the Boot ROM being different but he wasn't too sure, do you know anything about that Red?

 

[RedCroissant]

Thanks for the reply Red.

A friend mentioned a problem with the Boot ROM being different but he wasn't too sure, do you know anything about that Red?

I don't think there will be a problem with the Boot ROM. They're both the same Processor architecture and same generation as well. The ROM is also Open Firmware for both and since they are able to run the same version of OS 9, I really don't foresee any issues preventing that from happening. I think the only problem would be if you were running different version of OS X that would prevent the MDD from booting. But you're not doing that, so no worries as far as I can tell.

 

[MysticCow]

It looks like so long as the MDD doesn't have Firewire 800, you should be all right. If you can, though, find a restore disk from somewhere that matches the model (this is from what I'm reading on this). That will have the correct graphics drivers.

A generic OS 9 install might not be enough.

 

[MisterKeeks]

It looks like so long as the MDD doesn't have Firewire 800, you should be all right.

Correct.

A generic OS 9 install might not be enough.

Also correct.

You can download the OS9 dmg for this model here.