[G4] Format with or without OS9 Drivers?

[Sean O'Malley]

IIRC the OS 9 drivers write another couple of (very small) partitions to
your drive and install the disk drivers on your disk. This was to get
around the issue of not having a ROM on the harddrive. (We all of course
remember when you needed an Apple-Rom'd drive to boot from.)

With OS X, and the "New World" ROM machines the drivers are no longer
needed and thus neither are the extra tiny partitions.

The major disadvantage beyond having a bunch of small partitions (I think
there are like 3-5), is that these partitions can be used for other
purposes like virus etc and there is no real advantage to having them
hanging around besides having something else that could go wrong.

You can test this if you want. The extra partitions are hidden from the
Apple drive utilities, but something like pdisk/fdisk will display them.

Probably the quick/dirty way to look at it is to boot into Linux off cd
and view the two drives you have formatted with fdisk. (You can usually
escape out of the regular installer and grab a shell to look.)




On Wed, 13 Aug 2003, Dale Hoffman wrote:

> When formatting a drive for use with OSX, is there any DISadvantage
> to including OS9 drivers?
> If not, why make it optional?
> DaleH
>
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