|
|
|||||||||||
|
Cool Mac Gear• iPod Video • iPod nano • iPod 1G-2G • iPod 3G • iPod 4G • iPod Mini • PowerBook-iBook • Garageband |
By Senior Editor John H. Farr
Yes, I'm finally moving toward the inevitable: an OS X installation on an unsupported machine. In preparation for that momentous day, I've been working at setting up my Power Mac 8600 for the transition. Since I decided I first wanted to have the latest or last version of OS 9 (v. 9.2.2), I had a problem: the 8600 is only supposed to work with 9.1, tops. What to do? First you should know that this 8600 has two hard drives, both 7200 rpm SCSI disks. The machine has a 450MHz G3 upgrade and 448MB of RAM. No other modifications other than a USB card are involved. The 8600 runs all day long most days and hasn't skipped a beat for five years. I've been running it with one drive mirroring most of the other for some time. I use CopyAgent to schedule daily backups (even of my email database and address book) so that if anything happened to one drive, I could switch over to the other and keep working without tearing anything down. So far this has worked like a charm, but now I have Jaguar, a 32MB video card, and all the required goodies (XPostFacto, L2CacheConfig, etc.) in my hot little hands, so you know what that means. The first step, however, was making sure I could use the smaller of the two drives (4.5GB) for all my normal work if I blew up the big one (9GB) trying to install OS X. As it turned out, I'd done a lot of customizing of my workflows on the drive I now planned to initialize and partition for Jaguar. The 4.5GB drive needed a lot of massaging, in other words, to take up the slack. As long as I was going to have to work on it anyway (and delete a ton of stuff I never touched anymore) I might as well run the best version of OS 9, I said to myself. I had the updaters: 9.1 to 9.2.1 to 9.2.2, and thanks to the very helpful and aptly named OS 9 Helper app (free) from OS9forever.com, I was able to install both 9.2 upgrades without a single hitch. There must be one, but I haven't found it yet. Right now I'm booting up every day in 9.2.2 on a five-year-old machine, and that's using the former backup drive. I'm going to keep this going for a little while to make sure it's reliable, then back up everything on the other hard drive and reformat for Jaguar. Whether or not you Mac users with "old" machines plan to go with OS X eventually, my reassurance today is that you can at least very possibly enjoy the most highly-tweaked version of OS 9. It seems to be a tad more responsive than 9.1, and best of all, the installation solved a nagging problem I had where both hard drives failed to mount unless I did a hot restart. Now all the drive partitions show up on the desktop just like they used to, and I'm a happy camper.
Page: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
Page: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
|
Cool Mac Gear• iPod 1G-2G • iPod 3G • iPod 4G • iPod Mini • PowerBook-iBook • Keyboard Skins • Garageband
|
|||||||||
