I had to replace the hard drive in my Mac. The OS was upgraded to OSX 10.9.2. I am trying to reestablish the wireless connecton to my MG5220. System requirements for OS 9 are a Mac or compatible clone that shipped with a Power PC processor and has an optical drive, 40 MB of RAM (32 MB of RAM set to 40 MB virtual memory qualifies), and 150 to 400 MB of hard drive space, depending on installation options. 680×0-based Macs with PowerPC upgrades cannot install Mac OS 9.
2001: The “Read Before You Install” document on the Mac OS X install CD says that installing Mac OS X on a FireWire or USB drive is unsupported. That means it doesn’t work, right?
Firewire Drive For Mac Os 9.2 Folder Icon
Nope, it means your 90 free days of tech support isn’t valid. Big difference! If you’re willing to forgo your 90 free days of listening to Muzak, ahem, 90 free days of Apple phone support, here’s how and why you should install Mac OS X on an external FireWire drive.
A consumer-level system that can run Mac OS X, such as an iMac, iBook, or G4 Cube, only supports one internal drive at a time. What if you have lots of important financial documents or a music collection that took 15 hours to download stored on your internal hard drive?
If you partition your internal hard drive, as is strongly recommended for installing Mac OS X on a single drive, all of your data will be lost.* If you install Mac OS X onto your existing system without partitioning and anything goes wrong, you could lose all of your data anyway!
Benefits of an External Drive
But you’ve got FireWire ports (at least on the latest models)! When you’re ready to buy Mac OS X, get an external FireWire hard drive with it – they start at around $200. Here are the benefits:
No worrying about making backups or partitioning. If you don’t even know what partitioning is, this setup lets you avoid it.
It works just like a second drive. You get to keep all the free space you have now on your internal drive.
Portability. You can bring your hard drive over to your friend’s house and run Mac OS X on their Mac without having to install anything on their computer! Great for showing off how great you are, ahem, how great Mac OS X is.
Performance. Many FireWire hard drives are faster than the one that came with your Mac. The slowest currently available FireWire hard drives are about the same speed as the drives shipping in iBook and PowerBook G4!
The installation process is as easy as installing Mac OS X on your internal drive, with the driver software needed for controlling the external drive already built into the OS.
The only known issue occurs after installation with some drives: You cannot select the FireWire drive in Mac OS 9’s Startup Disk control panel to boot back into Mac OS X – it looks “grayed out”. If this is the case, restart your Mac and hold down the Option key. This opens the Startup Manager. You can then choose the FireWire drive and click the arrow to continue starting up into Mac OS X.
Boot mac os on windows. Updating the Startup Disk control panel to version 9.2 usually solves this problem.
Picking a Drive
What kind of drive should you use?
I bought a discontinued 6 GB VST Portable FireWire drive for a decent price. It’s neither the fastest drive nor the least expensive per gigabyte, but I like it because it’s cute, because VST has seamless Mac OS 9.1 support, and because it’s powered by the computer. Almost all currently shipping FireWire hard drives are advertised as bootable in Mac OS 9.1 and thus work for Mac OS X as well. Check with the manufacturer if they don’t advertise this feature.
What computer do I need for this to work?
All Macs with built-in FireWire except for the Blue and White Power Mac G3 and the “Yikes” Power Mac G4 will work fine.
Yes, but they’re very, very slow.** On average, USB hard drives are 1/20th the speed of FireWire drives with the same drive mechanism, or close to the speed of a floppy drive. Veteran Mac users know that booting off of a floppy takes several times as long as booting from a hard drive – and that was when the OS could fit on a 1.4-megabyte floppy. Canon ip4300 driver mac os. Mac OS X takes up over 1000 megabytes! The only Macs that didn’t ship with FireWire ports that can boot from USB are the 350 MHz iMacs and the original iBooks.
You will need to hold down the Option key while booting to select the USB drive.
Running Mac OS X on an external FireWire drive is just as easy and responsive as running it on your internal hard drive, with no problems short of losing that free Muzak. Darn!
* This was written when Mac OS X 10.0 was new, long before Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard added the ability to repartition a hard drive without wiping out your data.
** This was also the era of USB 1.1. USB 2.0 is 40 times as fast and still considered painfully slow when booting – but it’s much better than USB 1.1. FireWire 400 tends to run a bit faster than USB 2.0, which wasn’t an option on Macs in 2001.
Someone in our Facebook group asked an interesting question: “Anyone know the maximum size flash drive that can be used in OS 9.2 on a 300 MHz iBook G3?”
I have to admit, he had me stumped. Someone quickly chimed in that Apple’s HFS+ supports up to 2 exabytes (an exabyte is a million terabytes, and the biggest drives at present are in the 8 TB range), but that didn’t seem realistic. Cant see os drive mac. So I did what anyone with an Internet connection would do, I asked Google how big a drive Mac OS 9 supports.
As expected, it was a whole lot less than 2 exabytes. But I got conflicting information from Apple. Mac OS 8, 9: Mac OS Extended Format – Volume and File Limits says it supports 2 TB volumes. Mac OS 9 Booting: Hard Disk Size Limit? puts the limit at “about 190 GB” and Macintosh: Using 128 GB or Larger ATA Hard Drives says for use with Mac OS 9.2.2, each partition must be no larger than 200 GB.
As covered in How Big a Hard Drive Can I Put in My PowerPC Mac?, most G4 Macs – especially those introduced before 2002 – do not support UltraATA* drives over 128 GB capacity, and with the G5, Apple moved to SATA drives, where that’s not an issue. This is a hardware issue, not an operating system issue or file system issue.
For G3 Macs, there is no native support for “big” (over 128 GB) IDE hard drives, so hitting the 190-200 GB ceiling isn’t even possible.
What About USB?
SCSI and FireWire don’t have maximum drive size restrictions, although hardware that bridges an IDE drive to FireWire may have such restrictions. For instance, most early FireWire enclosures for UltraATA drives do not support “big” drives.
As with SCSI and FireWire, USB drive capacity is limited only by the file system used, so any Mac running OS 9 should have no trouble using USB flash drives up to 200 GB capacity – and higher than that if the user wants to partition the drive. (Mac OS 9 allows up to 21 partitions, so in theory you could use a 4 TB drive.)
The only drawback flash drives have is the speed of USB, and older Macs such as the first two clamshell iBooks and tray-load iMacs only have USB 1.1 ports for expansion. That’s horribly slow by modern standards. It was slow compared to SCSI and IDE when that first USB-only iMac arrived in 1998. USB 2.0 is 40x as fast, FireWire is faster than that, and USB 3.1 is almost 100x as fast as USB 1.1.
So while you can have a 200 GB USB flash drive on one of those old Macs with USB 1.1, you are going to have to be patient. It will take a long time to write anywhere close to that much data to them, so maybe you’ll want to let it run overnight.
Still, you can do it. Any flash drive below 200 GB should be no problem at all with any Mac running OS 9. (Tthis should apply equally to Mac OS 8.1 and later as well. We will investigate further.)
Drive For Mac Google
Update: We’ve already heard from someone successfully using a 500 GB SATA drive with a SATA PCI card and running OS 9 with one partition. If you have results to share, please use the comments. Thanks!
Firewire To Thunderbolt Mac
* We use the labels IDE and UltraATA interchangeably.