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Restore disk does not see Hard drives

P

paulwgraber

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 13, 2013
121
1
Well I found a G4 9.2.2 Restore disk off ebay in hopes it would work for my G4 MDD model. haven't tried the G4 one off mac garden yet. But To my surprise it booted up from the disk perfectly showing the OS9 logo and all (nice to see that again by the way). However when I go to restore it does not see my 2 HD. I have a 120G and a 250G. I click the switch disk and it just goes between the Restore CD and Restore Image Icons.

Just when I thought I finally had It, so close, boom. I am getting closer I think as all the other restore disks I tried just crashed the mac. But these booted right up.

So whats next guys.
 
Booted to OS 9?
Go to the Utilities folder - IIRC, that's right there on the desktop.
Find the Drive Setup, and run that.
Does Drive Setup see the hard drive that you want to use for installing OS 9?
Do an initialize on that drive, which should install the OS 9 drivers on the drive.

If you don't have any luck yet - where is each hard drive physically installed?
I think it has to be installed in the vertical mount near the rear of the Mac (not the horizontal mount under the optical drives)
Also, just as a test, make sure that the two drives, if connected to the same ribbon cable, are BOTH set either as cable select, or properly set as master and slave. Either master/slave, or cable select should work, but not a combination.
(I prefer master/slave)
 
Your hard drives most likely did not have the OS9 drivers installed when you formatted them originally.

Probably why OS9 does not seem them.
 
Yes it booted right to OS 9 from the disk. The drives are set to cable select and are hooked to the same ribbon on the vertical mount. That would be correct that they dont have OS9 drivers. In fact one drive has OS 10 on it and the other drive was formatted with OS 10 but has nothing on it. Obviously I am going to reformat one with OS9 and keep ten on the other. Let me muck around and see what I come up with. Heck at least it's booting into 9 though.
 
And, you have to erase the drive to get the OS 9 drivers installed.

The drivers really only help when you are trying to boot to OS 9, as the OS 9 boot drive needs the drivers. Any attached drive, Mac formatted, should still be visible when booted to OS 9, even without the drivers installed on the drive. But, it's also something to try to get the drives to mount.
 
Thanks for the tips. Wents to os9 lives .com. Nice info there too. I would love to just boot straight to os9 and not os9 within 10. They have instructions there how to do it. Meanwhile still trying to find my harddrives.
 
When booted to the OS 9 CD, can you get to the Utilities folder on the desktop?
Can you see your hard drives in Drive Setup?
 
OK. I formatted both HD with OS9 drivers and still no luck. When I boot from the restore CD I can not get to any folders on the disk.

My choices are only to switch disk, which goes between restore image and OS9 restore disk. Nothing else shows up on the screen.
 
OK, what happens when you choose the OS9 restore disk?
Should boot to the desktop, where you can launch the system installer - and, the folders will be there, too, with Drive Setup, etc.
 
when I choose the restore disk as a startup it just gives me that screen to restore and switch disks. Wish I could just post a pic of it. It does not show a clickable image to open up of anykind.
 
Beeng muckin around with it for hours. Even put an os9 system folder and app folder on one of the hard drives to no avail. This is rediculous. Something is wrond it shouldn't be this hard. I went to the OS9 forever website and they have people doing it left and right. I just don't understand why this is not working!!!
 
You're not using the correct restore discs. You either pirated the incorrect one or the one you bought off of eBay is not for a MDD.
 
How could I make absolutely sure they are the right disks? I figured they were since it booted from them no problem. They all look the same pretty much so how do I know which ones were for mine when trying to find them on say ebay or something?
 
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