LOL Well thank you Frederic!
As to the boot-abiliy of OSX on a beige, I think that if it were to happen that you needed an external way to do so, you would need a XPostFacto boot disk of some sort and a FireWire card installed. I am not sure of this, but there are others here who would know for certain.
With my beige, I can boot from the OS9 CD and then launch XPF to get me into Panther if the hard drive is acting surly. Because you have hardware that has it's own native operating system it prefers to play with, getting up and running is relatively simple when you figure out the logic. The coolest part is, OS9 doesn't mess with the OSX partition and leaves it alone. The ONE thing you have to be careful of however, is that OS9 gives you root privileges to the hard drive, and you can see a lot (but not all) of the files that OSX will have as invisible. Be careful there. Whereas OSX makes you type in passwords to get ot the guts of the code, OS9 doesn't, and if you're messing with the files in the OSX drive and you move the wrong thing, you can poach your system.
The issue with selecting the proper drive to start the system is limited by the XPostFacto boot enabler itself. After Jaguar OS X 10.2, Apple made it necessary for there to be a built-in USB resident in the hardware. XPF gets the system to load and either re-writes or fools the installer to firstly install the OS, then to boot sucessfully afterwards.
Because of this, having the drives set as master and slave and on the correct IDE bus is essential. To get the system to boot into OS9, you would press and hold the alt/option key as soon as you hear the startup chime. This stops XPF from launching OSX and the system will default to look for the next viable system folder, which would be the OS9 (which is after all, native to the hardware) on the next partition of the master drive. You'll want all the OS9 versions of the drivers for your PCI cards installed, of course..
You only have 1 option for your OS9 boot-up, even though you may have more than 1 system folder available: I cannot use the OS9 that is on 'Booger' to startup, unless I were to take it out of the external USB case and connect it to the internal IDE and disconnect the OSX drive. That is why it is now what I run the Classic out of exclusively. There
are some limitations, that have to do with the unsupported nature of Panther in a beige, that is one. The other, is the 8GB limit, and to be honest, I'm not exactly sure of why, but it's
only on the beige G3's - perhaps it's some function of the on-board ROM - I don't know. Any later USB-native G3's like the Blue & White models or the iMacs don't have this issue and all the newer Macs of course, can have huge partitions and drives in them.
Having full disk images on a Mac for the backup is somewhat redundant. If you'll be purchasing a new Mac, you ALWAYS get full install disks for the computer (they may be hardware specific for the model however) and if you purchase a universal installer (which you will want for Panther on your beige - see if you can find the 3 CD set, NOT the DVD, BTW..) you'll have it all right there. Once you install and get online - before you load anything else - get the OS to take whatever updates from Apple you'll need. Then add the other applications after you get it to OS 10.3.9 (the CD set I have is only 10.3.4).
As to serial numbers for applications you purchase - it's always best to write them down in a book. I have a little spiral-bound notebook with all of them. so if there is a real nasty issue that demands a clean install (like I had), I just checked the list in the book, saw everything was there, backed-up what I needed and nuked the drive. Easy peasy.
Just so you know, since you've mentioned the defrag and no doubt are a heavy user of ScanDisk you're in for a big surprise! Due to the UNIX framework under the Apple Mac GUI, the filesystem is totally different. It does NOT defrag and push all the data (other than the OS for obvious read-speed issues) to one area and tightly pack it in continuous blocks. It more or less evenly spaces the applications across the drive to give room between each for whatever virtual memory computing space it may need. Makes for faster read-writes from what I can gather, and the first (and
last) time I ran Norton to run the SpeedDisk to defrag, it kept telling me the drive was heavily fragmented - and this was ONE day after my original install back in January! Whoop! Not using that again. I found a better disk utility tool called DiskWarrior that understands the UNIX filesystem and doesn't try to move everything around. You don't want that, left to it's own devices, the OS has it's own scheduled maintenance and defrags on-the-fly and moves applications closer to the beginning of the drive based on how often you use them (somewhat like Norton SpeedDisk does I'm told). There are some small control panel applications that can schedule all the relevant disk maintenance for you, and in case of a real tough problem, DW for re-building the disk directory is about all that you'll need.
Deb.
