Reviving an iMac g3

[mcharley94]

First post...glad to be here, and also glad to be a newly converted Mac user. I bought my first Mac about a year ago, a MacBook Pro, to replace my aging Dell. That said, though I do have some experience under my belt regarding Leopard I am still learning the ways of a Mac. I am very well rehearsed in using that "other OS" and repairing 'IBM compatibles' (he says as he duck), but am just now dabbling into the hardware aspect of Mac's.

OK, so onto my question....

I just successfully replaced an aging (clicking) hard drive of a friends G3 (600MHz with 512 RAM). In place of the old 40GB 5200rpm I put in a 80GB 7200rpm. The old HD had OS 9.2 on it with an OS X 10.3.9 upgrade, all on one partition. In my research I read somewhere that it would be wise to reinstall OS 9.2 first and then on a separate partition install OS X, so I did just that. Everything is working peachy and I can mount either partition/OS without issue.

Here is the problem....When I partitioned the drive into two separate areas I made each partition of equal size. Having dabbled in Ubuntu a little one would think I would have had some forethought and made the OS 9.2 much smaller than the OS X, but sadly I did not.

I did do a search here first in regards to my dilemma, but everything seems to reflect having Tiger or Leopard installed. Seeing as I am one upgrade below BootCamp is there another way that I can resize these two partitions Live, without starting from scratch again? If need be I certainly can start over, and anticipating this I have yet to restore all of the back up data I've stored on an external, but I was hoping to forgo this process again.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

 

[MisterMe]

...

Any help would be greatly appreciated

I wish that you had asked these questions before you did anything to your machine. As a Mac user for 20 years and an owner for 19 years, I can assure you that the Mac provides a "no worries" experience. The proficient MS-DOS/Windows user is the user who can do wonderful things to his computer. The proficient Mac user is the user who can do wonderful things with his computer.

Apple will not trick you into fouling-up your computer. Let it be your guide. Since MacOS X started shipping, Apple shipped its Classic-compatible computers with MacOS 9 and MacOS X on a single partition. MacOS 9 and MacOS X were designed to operate from a single partition. They work well from a single partition. This is not to say that there isn't someone somewhere out here who needs the two OSes installed on separate partitions, but those cases are rare.

As for the notion of partitioning your hard drive, again this is unnecessary for the vast majority of users. You need it to do things like dual-boot MacOS X and Linux or if you intend to store special data [such as encrypted data] on one of your partitions. To the average user, to most users, multiple partitions are more trouble than they are worth. My own experience is that one partition inevitably proves to be too small.