When bad things happen to good Mac's [OT]

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On Thu, 21 Jul 2005 02:19:58 -0400, Mark Guertin wrote:

> Daniel, if you blew away the OS9 patch partitions with Drive Genius  
> there's a good reason why you can't boot OS9 anymore.  pdisk can put  
> the partitions back in place but the drivers required are not  
> installed by pdisk because the boot driver is proprietary to apple  
> and is required for OS9 to be able to boot the media (and the main  
> reason why oldworld can't boot linux from a cdrom as this also  
> requires apple's proprietary code).  The only free (as in speech)  
> tool I know of that can do this is mkisofs which won't help you much  
> in this situation as it can only be used to make bootable cd media  
> which uses a slightly different approach to the drives .. and not  
> sure that mkisofs can even do this anymore :(
> 
> You might have some success booting that drive from OS9 again if you  
> can get into any OS9 that is running and mount the drive, and then  
> using apple's drive setup program tell it to "update" the drivers on  
> that disk (which should be non destructive in theory, YMMV)... in  
> some cases it might also need a tiny bit more unpartitioned space on  
> the drive to put in extra patch partitions (which is also why apple  
> always left a bit of unpartitioned space on factory drive setups  pre  
> OSX to allow for future driver updates/addons).

I'm well aware of that, and that's exactly what I did. The thing is that
Drive Setup didn't let me Update Drivers until I recreated their
partitions with pdisk exactly as they were before. It's after I did that
and did the Update Drivers in Drive Setup that OS9 was able to recognize
the hard disk again, but not boot from it. With the driver partitions
gone, the hard disk icon wouldn't even show up in OS9 when booted from CD,
but after I restored the driver partitions (notice the difference between
my use of the word "recreated" and my use of the word "restored"), the
icon shows up, but the drive won't boot. Please excuse me for considering
that "restoring" the driver partitions meant that doing the Update Drivers
went without saying.

You should know that mkisofs never handled the driver partitions properly.
Also, Drive Setup is incapable of utilizing unpartitioned space for patch
partitions or drivers or anything else. All it can do is wipe out the
whole disk.