[crayz]

OK, I'm sure many of you already know the problem I'm having. When I formatted my HDs I didn't install OS 9 drivers on one of them(the one I was using OS X on). I thought "gee, I'm gonna have OS 9 on its own partition, so obviously that HD needs OS 9 drivers, but why would my OS X-only drive need them?"

Well...I didn't understand the fact that:
no OS 9 drivers == OS 9 can't see drives at all

So now I have all my MP3s sitting on a drive that OS 9 can't see, and when I boot into OS 9 to play a game, and I want to listen to music, I can't. Worse still, OS 9 can't even see the OS X disk to be able to select it as startup disk, so I have to have OS X installed on another partition of the drive w/ OS 9 (and OS 9 drivers) on it, so I can boot to the intermediate drive w/ OS X, and then from there see the main OS X drive.

Uggggh.

Anyway, I know the standard response is to reformat the drive and install the OS 9 drivers in the beginning, you dumb piece of sh*t.

Well, that nice, but the OS X-only drive is 120GB, about 90GB of which is full. I don't really have anywhere to back up that much data, so reformatting isn't an option.

However, here Joe Schmoe from Alsoft(makers of Diskwarrior) says this, in a list of possible ways of dealing with the problem:

2. You can use a third party utility to install the OS 9 drivers. This can be convenient if you don't have the time or patience to reinstall OS X.

Comments anyone? I have not heard of such a utility. Does one exist? Would my first-born son be a fair price to pay for it?

[Cipher13]

No reason that can't be done, I guess.

It's a ridiculous situation Apple has put users in - there is no reason NOT to have the driver installed, regardless. Heh.

[Millennium]

Although I'm not 100% certain of this, you might be able to use FWB's Hard Disk Toolkit to install the OS9 drivers. Just use the "Update Drivers" function. You'll have to do this from the OS9 side, but HDT should be able to see the drive (if not the volumes) even though OS9 drivers aren't there.

As for the "Pure HFS+" mode (the codename for HFS+ without the OS9 drivers or HFS wrapper), I'm not sure why Apple has taken this route, though I do know that TechTool has supported the format for several years, so this is not a new decision on Apple's part. However, I suspect that there are things they intend to do with HFS that OS9 would not be capable of doing. Or perhaps this is how they intend to disable OS9 booting on new PowerMacs (a dirty trick if I ever saw one, but very easy to reverse).