ElDiabloConCaca
U.S.D.A. Prime
Well, I've got this spare 10GB hard drive in my machine. Perhaps I should start off by saying that I've been OS 9-free since 10.2.6 and loving every minute of it. I used to have OS 9 installed on the 10GB and OS X installed on the 20GB, but now the 10GB is completely empty and the 20GB is formatted for OS X, journalled, with no OS 9 drivers.
Today I wanted to check out the new "Classic" menubar icon that you can activate under 10.3. I rebooted with my OS 9 CD, installed OS 9 on the empty 10GB and ran all the updaters. Great! It works! So then I open up "Startup Disk" from the Control Panels and it hits me like a ton of bricks -- I don't have OS 9 drivers installed on my OS X drive, so Startup Disk can't see my OS X drive, and I can't change the startup disk!
Now, I know many of you would say, "Hey, just hold down 'option' at startup and select the OS X disk!" Well, I would do that if my computer supported that feature -- see, I've got the first generation PCI G4 machine, and holding down Option at startup doesn't present me with that cool little hard disk selection menu like most of you... poor me. Well, then you'd say, "Hey, hold down shift-command-option-delete to force a search for other bootable disks!" That doesn't work either for some reason.
Long story short, on my machine, there seems to be an interesting "catch" where, if you have OS X on one volume WITHOUT OS 9 drivers, and OS 9 installed on a different volume, AND you have a machine like mine that doesn't support boot-time selection of startup disk, well, you're basically stuck booting into OS 9!
I thought of using the Panther install CDs to set the startup disk, but I don't remember there being an option for selection of startup disk on the Panther install disk!
Anyway, the one way I got it to finally boot back into OS X was to boot from the OS 9 CD, erase the OS 9 drive and restart and let the computer look for a bootup volume, of which there was only one left: the OS X hard drive.
Strange!
Today I wanted to check out the new "Classic" menubar icon that you can activate under 10.3. I rebooted with my OS 9 CD, installed OS 9 on the empty 10GB and ran all the updaters. Great! It works! So then I open up "Startup Disk" from the Control Panels and it hits me like a ton of bricks -- I don't have OS 9 drivers installed on my OS X drive, so Startup Disk can't see my OS X drive, and I can't change the startup disk!
Now, I know many of you would say, "Hey, just hold down 'option' at startup and select the OS X disk!" Well, I would do that if my computer supported that feature -- see, I've got the first generation PCI G4 machine, and holding down Option at startup doesn't present me with that cool little hard disk selection menu like most of you... poor me. Well, then you'd say, "Hey, hold down shift-command-option-delete to force a search for other bootable disks!" That doesn't work either for some reason.
Long story short, on my machine, there seems to be an interesting "catch" where, if you have OS X on one volume WITHOUT OS 9 drivers, and OS 9 installed on a different volume, AND you have a machine like mine that doesn't support boot-time selection of startup disk, well, you're basically stuck booting into OS 9!
I thought of using the Panther install CDs to set the startup disk, but I don't remember there being an option for selection of startup disk on the Panther install disk!
Anyway, the one way I got it to finally boot back into OS X was to boot from the OS 9 CD, erase the OS 9 drive and restart and let the computer look for a bootup volume, of which there was only one left: the OS X hard drive.
Strange!