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.

new website!

Hi,

Just finished updating my new website – http://www.themacguy.co.uk. Content is much the same as before, but the look is much better (I think). Changed to a new web host as well, so there may be a few teething problems.

Anyway, have a look.

Cheers,

Kev.

Quickfind 1.2

Just released a new version of QuickFind (1.2). New features include:

• Completely redesigned interface
• Much smaller footprint
• New icon
• New search options (thesaurus, news)

Cheers,

Kev

Can't access Adobe.com!

I found the answer to this problem on the Apple/Support/Safari forum, and thought it was useful enough to share here. For ages I haven't been able to get onto Adobe.com to access any of the forums there, or download anything; Safari just sat there trying for a while then timed out. The problem it seems was down to my DNS addresses (System Preferences/Network). I replaced the ones I'd got from my ISP with two from Opendns.com (208.67.222.222 & 208.67.220.220) and everything seems to be working fine now! I'd recommend you take a note of your old dns addresses before you replace them, and even mention this to your ISP.

Cheers.

Kev