Dual Booting OS X DP3 and MacOS9

[pastusza]

Is there a way to dual boot MacOS9 and MacOS X DP3?

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Andy Pastuszak
[email protected]

[markhers]

Yes.

[Mac Guru]

It's called partitions and is discussed in detail in the installation instructions that come with OS X DP3.

Mac Guru

[Seagull]

Could someone talk a bit about what do you do after you created two partitions, for example. Installed Mac OS in one and Mac OS X in the other. How do you go about booting the Mac OS X? Do you use the System Disk program at ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/macosxserver/utilities/SystemDisk2.3.1.smi.bin or using a different method? How do you choose a default operating system?

[This message has been edited by Seagull (edited 03-03-2000).]

[macopz]

Yes, system disk will allow you to choose what OS you want to use, and, I am not sure if this is only on machines with fairly new motherboards or not, but you can hold option when you turn on the machine and it will bring up a graphical way of selecting which partition you wish to start off of. Yet again, not sure how new of a machine you have to have for the second option, but it works on an iMac DV SE...

MacOpz www.macopz.com (http://www.macopz.com)

[MAlan]

When you install DP3 does it force you to reformat your hard drive? When I get Mac OS X I want to be able to do a dual boot between OS X and OS 8.6. Do you think I'll be able to do this?

I would prefer not to have to reformat the hard drive.. What I'd like to do is install X on my OS 9 partition, keep all my data from all my partitions and have it dual booting with 8.6.

[chicken_tastes_good]

If you want to install OSX DP3 on an existing os 9 partition but keep the data from the OS9 partition - better use retrospect and a cd-r. OS X initializes the install partion before it installs. You would lose everything on the OS9 partition

[markhers]

The graphical OpenFirmware is only available in PowerMac G4's, new iMacs, new iBooks (I think) and new PowerBooks. If you don't have any of these machines, you have to make sure you have an OS 8.6/9 partition somewhere with System Disk and the corresponding extension installed.

[fast4]

Make sure you use System Disk 2.6.2 that came on the DP3 cd not the one at the ftp link above.

fast4

[Seagull]

It seems like the topic has not advance much. Could someone who had installed Mac OS X DP3 please give some more information. To make it easier for you to give information, I would like to go through the process steps by steps below.

Let's say that I have a desktop beige G3 at 233MHz with its traditional 4MB ROM. It has a 4GB hard disk, I partitioned it into two 2GB partitions, one in HFS+ and has Mac OS 9 installed on it. The other partition is available to install Mac OS X. The computer is turned off and I have the Mac OS X DP3 CD-ROM in my hands.

Turning on the computer, how do I start installing Mac OS X into the preprared partition? Do I startup the Mac using the Mac OS X CD? If yes, how do I start the OS X installer? What is the format of the OS X CD and what OS is on the CD that it can started up the Mac? If no, how do I start the OS X installer on Mac OS 9?

After installing Mac OS X into the partition, I suppose you need to restart the computer. If so, what OS will the computer boot up in? If it boots up in OS X, how do you set the computer to boot up Mac OS 9 next time? If it boots up in Mac OS 9, how do you set the computer to boot up in OS X next time?

Could you choose to use Mac OS 9 as the default OS to boot everytime and with the System Disk extension installed, you have the choice to boot OS X that way? In which case it would be similar to booting the BeOS.

[This message has been edited by Seagull (edited 03-02-2000).]

[sixkiller]

It's really quite simple. To get from Mac OS 9 into Mac OS X, you open the System Disk utility, select your Mac OS X partition and click Save. To get from Mac OS X back to Mac OS 9, hold option _early_ in the boot procedure so that your PRAM is set back to OS 9.

[Seagull]

Are you sure sixkiller? Holding down the Option key will bring up the System Disk extension's window which you can set the computer to boot in Mac OS X next time. How could holding down the Option key reset the PRAM?

Since the Mac OS X use the Open Firmware, if you configured the computer to boot Mac OS X then OS X will boot almost immediately after the computer is turned on. Mac OS 9 will not have the chance to boot and so is the System Disk extension.

I would think that if you have setted the computer to boot up in Mac OS X using the System Disk software, then if you want to start up the computer with Mac OS 9 or any other regular Mac OS you would have to zap the PRAM and so reset the Open Firmware by holding down the Command + Option + P + R keys at start up.

[markhers]

The way to bypass the DP3 setting is to hold down option. On any pre-G4, pre-Pismo, pre-current iMac model, this will bypass the entire DP3 OpenFirmware setting.

You can stop holding option after you see the Mac screen (the one with rounded corners).

To set which startup disk you want to use, I have heard that you have to hold down Option and Click the disk with DP3 installed on it.

[Seagull]

Thank you for the information markhers, but it is still not clear to me. Let's say that I have a beige desktop G3 at 233MHz like I said before. So, if I hold down the Option key, this will bypass the OS X's Open Firmware settings? Is this something has been added into Mac OS X or what does holding down the Option key actually do? Clear the PRAM? Or just the bypass the OS X's Open Firmware settings without resetting anything? I suppose, if you want to startup the Mac next time with Mac OS 9, you will have to hold down the Option key again?

[rtamesis]

If you don't hold down the option key on startup, your mac will boot off the Mac OS X partition. If you want to boot off your Mac OS 9 partition, hold the option key down until the Mac happy face appears.

[wyzeguy]

Holding down the option key on older macs (like your beige G3) lets your computer know that you want to boot off of the internal ROM instead of from a partition on your drive. This obviously won't work on newer macs that have a software based ROM image. I assume at this point that OSX checks to see if the option key is held down while it begins booting and if it is then it takes care of letting you know which partitions you can start up off of (hence the snazzy graphical partition selector). Hope this helps clear things up for you.

Originally posted by Seagull:
Thank you for the information markhers, but it is still not clear to me. Let's say that I have a beige desktop G3 at 233MHz like I said before. So, if I hold down the Option key, this will bypass the OS X's Open Firmware settings? Is this something has been added into Mac OS X or what does holding down the Option key actually do? Clear the PRAM? Or just the bypass the OS X's Open Firmware settings without resetting anything? I suppose, if you want to startup the Mac next time with Mac OS 9, you will have to hold down the Option key again?

[Orbit]

Okay, anyone who needs to ask how to do this should NOT be installing DP3 on their machines. Trust me on this one. If you don't know how to select a system disk or how to partition your hard drive, or much less how to install OS X onto a specific partition (which is painfully easy.. come on people..) then OS X will not be ready for you until the final version comes out. With that said...

Boot into OS 9 or 8.6 or whatever from your hard drive. I assume that you already have a blank partition on your disk or one which can be reformatted to accomodate OS X. Put the OS X DP3 CD in the drive, and launch the installer. It will reboot your machine and start it up from the OS X partition on the CD. From there, you run the OS X installer, and tell it to install on whichever partition you want. It gives you this option in a pop-up menu before it starts installing. Click go-ahead and wait for it to do its thing. When it is done installing, it will restart and you will boot into OS X. If you want to boot into Mac OS 9 or 8.6, hold down option at startup. On any machine before the latest revs (iBook, iMac, G4) this will boot right into Mac OS 9.. on the newer machines, it will bring up a graphical window which will allow you to select which disk to boot off of.

Seriously, if ANY part of this makes anything less than perfect sense to you, don't even attempt it or you'll probably end up erasing all your data or something.. Geez.. I'd hate to see some of you try to install Linux.....

[This message has been edited by Orbit (edited 03-03-2000).]

[Seagull]

In relation to the message of wyzeguy. I have a Power Mac with the traditional 4MB ROM. Well, I used Boot Variables and set the Open Firware not to load the ROM and specified a boot disk and a boot file that does not exist. As you would expect, when the computer is restarted, because the Open Firware cannot find the boot file in the boot disk specified, it displayed a message saying so and it stay right there.

I tried restart the computer several times and hold down the Option key, as I thought, the computer still used the Open Firware settings and did NOT bypass the settings to load the ROM and therefore the regular Mac OS does not get the chance to be load. I am not clear why several people said that if you hold down the Option key, this will bypass the Open Firware settings of Mac OS X.

[Michael Milvich]

The easest way to boot back into Mac OS 9/8 is to goto the preferance.app and then to the startup panel and select the partition that has 9 or 8 installed on it. Restart and you are back in 9 or 8. (This is pretty well explained in the readme that came with DP3)

Michael

[Seagull]

Thanks Michael, but in case that there is something wrong with Mac OS X that you cannot load it to use the "preferences.app" then I would think zapping the PRAM is the only way to get back to Mac OS 8/9 if your Mac has the 4MB ROM. Holding down the Option key does not work for me, as I said before.

[abner]

Its true that you can screw up your pram settings so that os 9 will not be able to boot. To clear this ram, reboot while holding down " Command-Option-P-R". This works at least up until the Beige G3.

Also, you must boot off of the cdrom to install os x. It is also important, at least on a beige G3, that you only try to boot os x from a master IDE drive. Slave drives, including CDRoms don't seem to work.

[This message has been edited by abner (edited 03-05-2000).]

[WiseWeasel]

[No flaming!]

[This message has been edited by markhers (edited 03-08-2000).]

[Seagull]

Mind your language there Wise Weasel. Speaking for myself, I don't have the OS X DP3 CD-ROM and I don't want to get it either. I am just curious about what lies ahead as far as the Mac OS platform is concern. I asked the questions so that developers with the resources and the know-how to tell us in advance a bit of things we will getting our hands on when the OS X is released.

[RichardS]

*SIGH*

It is so painfully easy, how could this thread have gone on for 22 posts?

To install OS X you put in the OS X CD and double click on the OS X Installer. (Just make sure you created a second partition in advance).

To boot back into the MacOS you open SystemDisk utility (NOT the one in your OS 9 Control Panels folder, NOT the one in the OS X Prefs window. The one that is in the Utilities folder in the OS X Disc.)

There you select your startup disk. SystemDisk.app will determine what kind of OS resides on that partition, and configure your machine to boot up from there.

In Review: Click on the damned disk you want to start up from. http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/smile.gif

RichardS

[gerhard]

A: Did you read the DOCS ????
R: ehhr, yes the 'i agree' part :-P

[Seagull]

Nothing wrong with discussions as far as I am concerned. RichardS, you have not clear up something. Back to one of my original messages, what do you do in the case of something wrong with the OS X disk and you cannot boot into it. Some people said that you hold down the Option key to boot into Mac OS 8/9 and as I said, this does not seems to work with Macs with the 4MB ROM. What have you found about that?

[Orbit]

If that happens, reset your PRAM. It's NOT that hard people.

[Orbit]

If that happens, reset your PRAM. It's NOT that hard people.

[Ster]

also, if you get caught at the open firmware screen, typing 'bye' should boot you back into mac os... but don't hold me to that, i'm just extrapolating from my (very little) knowledge of open firmware
hope that helps,
ster

[nibs]

i have a rev. d imac with both darwin and mac os 9 setup. after configuring system disk to boot into darwin, holding down option will not boot back into mac os 9. system disk is an extension on the mac os 9 partition which is not looked at. if there is a system disk utility in mac os x or mac os x server; consider yourselves lucky. i've been holding down 'c' and booting from a cd, then running system disk and switching back to the mac os partition. i've been trying to figure out an easier way and i refuse to zap my pram. anyway, using system disk is only necessary to go from darwin to mac os. i've found that holding down option will send the boot into darwin without a system disk utility. also, simply opening startup disk and deselecting the mac os partition will cause darwin to boot first. i think this is because the darwin partition is in front of the mac os partition. holding down option simply tells the system to ignore open firmware and boot from the first disk available. if you put your mac os partition in front of your dp3 partition holding down option should drop you into mac os. since i don't have a darwin disk, and i installed from a zip, i can't test that theory out. i wish i had dp3.

[Angus_D]

OK people:

At the moment, it is recommended to have 2 different partitions when you install Mac OS X, so that you CAN choose between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X.

To install onto a partition, basically you just boot up from the Mac OS X CD (which has 2 partitions, one HFS and one UFS I think, only the HFS one appears in the Finder). You open the installer app in Mac OS 9, click a button.

The installer then seems to set Open Firmware to boot up from the UFS partition, which contains Mac OS X.

You reboot, and are greeted with an aqua loading screen. You are launched into InstallerX, where you can select which partition you want to install onto (it can install on HFS+ and UFS).


On newer computers, if you start up holding down the option key you get a screen where you can select the boot disk in Open Firmware by pressing tab. This is only on the newest of the new macs. I have an iMac Rev.D, so this doesn't work.

In Mac OS 9, if you want to get to OS X, you run the System Disk application, select your OS X disk, then hit save and restart your computer. This sets OF to boot from that partition.

The reason the System Disk control panel doesn't work is because it doesn't recognise the Mac OS X drive as having a valid system folder - it doesn't have a system file, so it chucks out an error and sez you can't boot from it.

If you are in Mac OS X, you open Preferences.app and click on the system disk panel, then select the Mac OS 9 partition, close the app and IMMEDIATELY hit Shut Down from the Special menu. If you log out first, for some wierd reason it decides it doesn't want to boot from Mac OS 9 and reboots into X.

Using the System Disk extension, if you are booting up in Mac OS 9 and hold down the option key, you are prompted with a dialog during the startup process which is basically the same as the system disk application, but if you select the Mac OS X partition it immediately reboots into it.


Just another note - The OS X installer wipes the partition you are installing it on to, so DO NOT install it over a previous Mac OS 9 partition unless you want to screw yourself.

Also, I wouldn't refer to it as PRAM, it just gets confusing. Just talk about it as Open Firmware, which is what it is, and everybody will be happy http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/smile.gif

Also, to orbit: people are just interested in how things work at the moment, they don't necessarily want to install DP3 for themselves.

DP3 is only for developers, and as such it shouldn't really be used by the public. It is not tweaked, there are bugs, and hardly any carbon apps exist at the moment so your choice of different software to run is very limited.


Hope this helps, I'm sure most of this content has been talked about before, just trying to represent it in a more flowing and easier to read way http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/smile.gif

-- Angus D

[MAlan]

O.k. I think Angus_D has finally explained things pretty well. I just have a couple more questions after reading all these posts.

Its clear to me that installing OS X on a previous OS 9 partition will cause me to lose all of my information on that partition so I better back up that information before I install OS X. Now I'm keeping my OS 8.6 partition will OS X do anything to that partition when installing? I'll probably back it up anyway but I was just curious. Also, can you save information from work you've done on OSX to your OS 9/8 partition? Thirdly...I'm pretty sure I formatted my hard drive on my DV/SE to HFS+ file system when I received OS 9...however, I can't remember for sure. I don't know how to check the formatting of the drives...is there a utility that will tell me whether I'm using HFS+ or rather an older file system?

I imagine it would be a good idea to have every partition, whether it has OS X or 9/8 on it, containing the same file system as the other partitions.

[This message has been edited by MAlan (edited 03-13-2000).]

[nibs]

to find out what type of file system is on a partition:
in the finder highlight the volume in question, then click on the file menu. goto get info and voila...standard is hfs; extended is hfs+.
pdisk can read those linux filesystems e??
i'd use that ufs filesystem over hfs+ because it's faster. darwin can read hfs+ filesystems so os x has to be able to. thus you can save directly to your os 9 partition from os x. i wouldn't bother worrying about os 9 reading ufs partitions (which it can't) cuz os 9 can't use os x apps. i wouldn't put any classic apps on the os x partition cuz that's a waste of space.
also, since the final [retail] release of os x installs seamlessly on top of os 9, it won't erase your partition unless you tell it to. (of course then you'd have to use a hfs+ filesystem). all the hassle of backing up data is only for the developer previews.

[MAlan]

Nibs...thanx for the info. I think what I'm going to do is keep my partitions formatted in HFS+ when I get OS X because I don't want to lose that hard drive space when I go to do my audio recording in 8.6.

As soon as I find a suitable multitrack recording software for OS X I'll probably reformat the whole hard drive to UFS.

[piracy]

Why would you want to dual boot DP3 and OS9. We'll be getting the final in 5 days http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/confused.gif

[Geobunny]

Originally posted by piracy:
Why would you want to dual boot DP3 and OS9. We'll be getting the final in 5 days http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/confused.gif

Why would you want to dredge up this 13 month old thread when we'll be getting the final in 5 days?! http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/confused.gif

[Edit: Notice how the people who used to be on these forums, the real developers, are now nowhere to be seen? Odd ]

[This message has been edited by Geobunny (edited 03-19-2001).]