Hey guys,

First off, FYI, it's now possible to natively boot OS9 on previously unsupported hardware. I have a mac mini 1.5ghz g4 silent upgrade booting OSX 10.5.8, OS9, and MorphOS :)

The OS9 speed is really great. It's a polished OS. Even though this is a MorphOS forum, I suspect some people may be interested to learn this.

Anyway, I find that when I boot into OS9, on the next reboot, the early boot menu no longer recognizes MorphOS as a bootable volume. I have to use the MorphOS cd-rom every time to "re-bless" the MorphOS bootinfo.txt or whatever it is.

So, I guess I have a few questions:

1. Anyone know why this is happening?
2. Any way to prevent this from happening?
3. Is there an OSX tool I can use to re-bless MorphOS? The manpage for 'bless' has been helpful but the language of the manpage suggests it's used to select the boot image for the /current/ OS. I could be wrong, but the language of it seemed destructive and rather scary. :P
4. Could I just add a MorphOS boot volume to a standalone CD that points at the actual on-disk volume? Booting the MorphOS live CD just to rebless something takes quite a bit of time.

Thanks!

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I would look to see if there is a way to set up MacOS9 to ignore the MorphOS partitions completely, if that is possible. Then it shouldn't mess up your MorphOS partitions each time you run MacOS9. Hope this helps.

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This is what I've also noticed. I'd love to see if there's a resolution to this, as I'd like to make the most of the extra drive space now that I have an SSD inside my Mac Mini. Please could you let me know if you come across any solutions?

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Yeah, you could I suppose... Make an ISOPATH folder and copy mac_ppc32 contents from a MorphOS ISO there. Then edit bootinfo.txt and edit the boot command to look like

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assuming DH1 is where your MorphOS install is. Now make an ISO with mkisofs

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For the hfs.map use something like:
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Might work :) but you may as well just run MorphOS from the OF cmdline. I doubt there is a way to make OS9 NOT break the installation and this is something we have never aimed to support.

MacOS9 is indeed a polished OS - I used it a lot during my first years as a research assistant - but it comes from the days when it was difficult to get MacOS to co-exist happily with other operating systems.

Thanks for the suggestions, folks. I’m actually going to try something else entirely, which is perhaps an over engineered solution. But I also notice that my hardware being hooked up to a KVM makes it impossible for me to hit the early boot menu, and I am not a big fan of having separate keyboard and mouse hooked up :P

My plan is to repartition to free up some space for a dedicated linux installation. I’ll use gentoo with yaboot and hopefully using that as a boot loader will always make it possible for me to boot MorphOS without having to hit the graphical Mac boot menu.

Jacadcaps I may try your solution as well at first just to see how that works out. Thanks for the recommendation!

That said, if I get the yaboot/linux thing working, I will have a quad boot Mac mini g4. Which on its own is pretty cool :P

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Just launching the boot.img file should work fine. The blessing is just needed to automatically find the boot.img file. Specifying the full path along with the boot.img filename into your boot menu configuration should just do the job.

Ah, nice. Ok. I think that being the case, yaboot seems like a good solution. I wasn’t sure if I’d need to bless things to boot with yaboot or not, so this works great. I’m going to resize some partitions in a bit and do a stripped down gentoo install just for boot purposes (plus it having linux tools on hand is never a bad thing). Thanks!