I am new to MorphOS but I am very experienced with completely trashing operating systems. I would like a second install of Morph on a separate HDD so I can "sandbox" on one drive and have a refined installation on the second drive.

All the info I see on dual booting is for the usual MacOS & MorphOS info as one would expect.

Does anyone have input on booting two drives with Morph + Morph? (I saw what happens when you have two DH1 partition names on two different drives but I have a hunch DH1 cannot be altered).

I can toss an Nvidia card in to have a separate monitor for OF if that is what I may need to pull this off.

Worst case, I will splice a toggle switch on the drive power cables and put a Hurst gear shifter on top of the machine but I'm unsure of where to mount the clutch pedal. : D

TIA for any tips!

-E

You can totally do this!

When booting MorphOS from OF, you've got to pass the bootdevice=dh2 (for example, must be a drive name, not a logical name). You could even create 2 HFS boot partitions, modify the bootinfo.txt to include said bootdevice argument so that you could use Apple's boot menu. That'll suck a bit since you mention NVidia as that's where the boot menu will show up.

I do advise starting by messing with OF prompts rather than modifying bootinfo.txt. Mind that you need to call "hfsssetmacboot boot:bootinfo.txt" from a shell to re-bless the file after editing of OpenFirmware won't read it.

Yeah, all kinds of combinations are possible. I have two or more MorphOS boot/system partitions (on the same hd) on most of my MorphOS machines. Just look how the original Boot (DH0:, HFS) and System (DH1:, SFS) partitions are, and make similar partitions elsewhere, but give them different device names (I have DH0.2:, DH4:, etc.) and different volume names (Boot2:, System2: etc.).

Additional HFS partitions are only needed if you want to be able to select the another installed system from the Apple's graphical boot menu, which you get by pressing the Alt key at the startup. This is a clean and easy solution if you need to boot between systems a lot.

Otherwise it's enough just to have another System partition, and then you can boot to it from the OF prompt or make a forth script to select boot options (see BootCreator, although I don't remember if Macs needed some modifications on that, but you can search old threads for that). If you want to have different versions of the OS, you can rename boot.img files to different ones on the same HFS partition too. Just call the boot line with different options.

Actually, I have the main HFS partition on my main setup that boot automatically to the main system, but then have another HFS partition which just launches a bootmenu made in Forth. On that bootmenu I can select different partitions to boot from, CD boot, or to boot a MorphOS ISO image from USB or HD.

But on other machines I just have two or three different OS installations without a menu, with or without corresponding HFS partition.

So, it's what you find useful compared to amount of tinkering :)