Re: [PLUG] mac os 9 or x reinstall

["William H. Magill" <magill@mcgillsociety.org>]

On Saturday, March 15, 2003, at 07:06  PM, nash oudha wrote:

> hi there
>
> i installed Yellow dog on my girlfrinds ibook (ereased the hard 
> disk)now i want to put os 9 and os x back to the ibook every time i 
> boot from the restore CD of os 9or the os x cd i get a messege that 
> there is no hard disk or invaild hard disk... i geuss because there no 
> HFS found,
>
> is there any way to format the HD in HFS or any tools
>
> please help before my Gfrind come back from Japan she will kick my ass

Get your pillows out...

If you want to ONLY re-install OSX, or OS 9, it should not be too 
difficult.
Boot the OS X CD and use the pulldown menu to run the Disk Utility to 
format the disk drive. (It is better at dealing with "weird disks" that 
is OS9.) You basically have to wipe the BSD labels which exist on the 
disk for OS9 to even think there is a disk there that has nothing on 
it. It assumes that if the disk has something on it that it can't read, 
it must be important. ... but that is what has kept various third party 
utility folks in business.

The Restore CD is a boorish thing. It only does one thing, and assumes 
a lot. An actual OS 9 distribution CD is better at wiping disks than 
the restore CD is.

You should make two HFS+ partitions -- one for OS9, the other for OS X.

Once you have reformatted the disk, reboot with the OS 9 CD and install 
OS9
(If the disk is larger than 8 meg OS9 needs to be in the first 8 meg if 
you want it to boot.)

After you have re-installed OS 9 and run through the various updates to 
9.2.2, reboot with the OS X CD and install OSX on the other partition 
and run through the various updates for it.

In both cases Apple's System Update does a good job of picking up the 
latest consolidated updates needed to get the latest and current things 
on your system with a minimum of effort, but you still need to run the 
update (either 9 or X) multiple times because it will not install 
everything in one pass. It installs things in order of dependencies. 
(Certain application won't update until certain OS updates have been 
installed, ditto for security updates, etc.).

If you want to run Yellow Dog, however, you can't boot OS 9 from the 
same disk, unless Yellow Dog will install on an HFS+ partition (I don't 
know.) You can use OS X to format the disk with a UFS file system and 
install it on that. However, you loose some substantial "benefits" of 
the Mac GUI if you do. The recommended technique is to install OSX 
itself as HFS+ and use UFS for "data disks."

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
# Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg
# Flat-panel iMac (2.1) 800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg
# PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg]- Tru64 5.1a
magill@mcgillsociety.org
magill@acm.org
magill@mac.com

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