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iModFrenzy

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 15, 2015
896
873
Kamino
I want to install OS 9 on my PowerBook G4 A1046(FW800) but I am not sure if its possible. What would I need to do to install it?

Is it possible to give OS 9 a partition so I can dual boot 10.5.8 and OS 9?
 
Via Everymac

Classic Mode Only*
Details: *This model is capable of using Mac OS 9 applications within the Mac OS X "Classic" environment provided with Mac OS X 10.4.11 "Tiger" and lower ("Classic" is not supported starting with Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard"). It cannot boot into Mac OS 9.
 
No Aluminum Macbook can natively be booted into OS 9.

There has been some work over at OS 9 lives with getting "unsupported" Macs to boot OS 9, but I don't know if the ability to do so extends to models that late.
 
You can put an OS 9 system folder on the system, but the computer will not boot off of it. The best you can do is designate that folder for Classic mode in Tiger(and earlier).

Read over at OS9 Lives, and you might find some magic that will allow you to boot into OS 9, but I don't know offhand what it involves.

All of that aside, your computer has a Radeon 9600 GPU. OS 9 and Core Image GPUs tend to be mutually exclusive, and the drivers just aren't there to run the GPU correctly. If you can get it to boot to OS 9(again, with some tricks that some very smart folks have spent a lot of time figuring out, so I don't want to deride their efforts), you'll likely find the graphics performance pretty low and also very limited. There's a chance you'll end up with an 800x600 window in the center of your screen, as I had on a TiBook before I found the correct OS 9 install for it. You may also find that you're limited to 256 colors.

If you want a laptop to boot into OS 9, the best choice-bar none-is a 1ghz Titanium Powerbook. It fully and natively supports OS 9, although you'll need the system-specific install disks for full functionality under OS 9.
 
You can't install OS 9, because that powerbook won't boot natively to an OS 9 system. That does not prevent you from copying (with a simple file copy) an OS 9 System Folder.
That would allow you to use the OS 9 Classic environment - IF (and only if) you have an OS X partition with Tiger or older OS X system installed on that partition.
The OS 9 system can be on the same partition, or could be on an external drive. The important point is that the Mac either needs to be a model that is capable of booting to OS 9 natively, or that the OS X booting system is 10.4.11 or older.

Leopard dropped support for using an OS 9 Classic environment, so an OS 9 system with Leopard would simply be a few folders with a bunch of files with no real purpose.
 
Thanks, but any reason as to why we can't install OS 9?

Because the aluminum PowerBooks came out during the era when Jobs and Apple were trying to kill OS9 dead.

So they made certain models incapable of booting from OS9. That includes the aluminum PowerBooks.
 
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