Friday 29 June 2007

the importance of OS9 system discs

I've just finished working on a Power Mac G4 which wouldn't boot up. I could have just wiped the drive and reinstalled OSX, but the client wanted to recover a lot of data off the drive first (Disc Warrior had been running for three days and found 294474 overlapped files, but got stuck at that point!). The drive was so corrupted that it wouldn't even boot in Target Firewire Mode (TFM). I tried a lot of things to get this machine booting up again (Disc Utility, Techtool Pro, Disc Warrior) all with no luck.

The solution? First I booted the G4 up using an OS9.2.1 disc, then connected an iBook in TFM mode. The thing about booting from OS9 discs is that you still have access to the desktop. This meant that I could just copy the data from the G4's drive to my iBook, which appeared on the G4's desktop, whilst all the time booted from the OS9 disc.

I'd really like to know why Apple has removed this functionality from its OSX install discs.

Cheers,

Kev.

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