Repair Mac OS 9.2.2 disk drivers without wiping disk? - Macintosh Garden

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2011, May 12 - 8:43pm

#1

Aritimi

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Joined: 2011 May 12

Repair Mac OS 9.2.2 disk drivers without wiping disk?

Okay, so Mac OS 9.2.2 was booting and working just fine. Then it stopped booting properly; now it just shows a flashing floppy image. Reinstalling (which has to be done in Classic Mode from within OS X Tiger, for some reason) did not help, so I have a hunch it's the drivers. I read that I could fix the drivers without wiping the whole disk by booting into the install cd and selecting Update Drivers in the Disk Utility. However, when I try to do this, Update Drivers is greyed out. When I load Disk Utility in OS X Tiger via Classic Mode, it can't even see the disk.

I don't see any update drivers option on the Mac OS X Tiger CD's Disk Utility.

The computer is an iBook G3, 900mHz, late 2003 I believe.

Any ideas? A lot of programs work better in real Classic rather than Classic Mode, so I would really like to fix this, but wiping the whole disk would be too much trouble.

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2011, May 13 - 5:03am

#2

Marcelw

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Joined: 2011 Mar 31

I assume you set up a dual boot - do you use 2 partitions or are both system versions installed on the same partition?

If you use 2 partitions, you might try the disk utility in Tiger's installation for the OS 9 partition, else I believe that you won't be able to repair this without wiping the disk since OS X uses a different driver structure and might be damaged by extensive repair work.

2011, May 13 - 6:29pm

#3

Aritimi

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Joined: 2011 May 12

Separate partitions. Well, technically, there are two OS 9.2.2 System Folders, since I had to put one on Tiger's partition so that I could run the 9.2.2 installer in Classic mode, and install it on a separate partition. For some reason, the installer didn't work when I booted straight off the CD. Anyway, both of them display a flashing floppy if I try to boot to them.

Tiger's Disk Utility doesn't offer an Update Drivers function so far as I can tell. Neither does Panther's. (Panter is not installed, but I have an old set of install CDs for it lying around.) The OS 9.2.2 Drive Setup does, but like I said, it doesn't work (greyed out if I boot off the CD, can't see the disk from Classic Mode).

Now, I don't think the actual disk drivers are on either the Tiger nor the Classic partition. You can't see them in the graphical disk utilities, but from pdisk, the first 8 partitions look like this:
1: Apple_partition_map Apple 63 @ 1
2: Apple_Driver43*Macintosh 56 @ 64
3: Apple_Driver43*Macintosh 56 @ 120
4: Apple_Driver_ATA*Macintosh 56 @ 176
5: Apple_Driver_ATA*Macintosh 56 @ 232
6: Apple_FWDriver Macintosh 512 @ 288
7: Apple_Driver_IOKit Macintosh 512 @ 800
8: Apple_Patches Patch Partition 512 @ 1312

I don't see any reason why I shouldn't theoretically be able to fix those partitions without touching everything else on the disk, but I don't seem to have a tool capable of doing it.

P.S. Earlier I was getting impossible captchas when I tried to post this. Now apparently it is working.