[Ti] How do I remove OS9 from Panther?

[Chris Olson]

On Dec 3, 2003, at 8:47 PM, Loren Schooley wrote:
> No, I said "zeroing" speeds it up IMMENSELY, not "erasing" OS9. You 
> can re-add OS9, but zero first. Perhaps you should give up the old 
> wife's tale and get ya some young tale to get you back up to speed ;-)

Perhaps:-)  But I fail to see what zeroing the drive does as far as 
picking up speed on I/O to the disk.  The only possible benefit is 
having data that's 100% contiguous.  But again, experience has shown 
that that doesn't make any difference with OS X.  Operating system 
files are static, ie. they don't change and therefore don't contribute 
to fragmentation of the filesystem.  It's your user data that's 
constantly being written and deleted that contributes to that.  Easiest 
and safest way to defragment a unix filesystem is to copy all the user 
(volatile) data to an external source, delete it locally, then copy it 
back.  I can virtually guarantee you'll get the same performance as 
zeroing the drive, even though it's not zero'd.  And the performance 
hit from a filesystem that's say 15% fragmented is so minimal that it's 
barely discernible.  So IMMENSE gains in I/O times to the disk just 
aren't there.  Especially in laptops where you're normally dealing with 
sub-7200 rpm drives, and the drive's read/write head is easily able to 
keep up with the design limitations of the drive's small disk spinning 
at 5400 rpm.

> Actually, OS9 DOES slow things down, because of all the time it takes 
> to explain why ya still use it. :-)

It actually speeds things up dramatically when you have software you 
need, with no OS X support, and the only other alternative is a Windows 
version of the software in VPC.

>> I've installed Panther on perhaps 20-30 machines now for various 
>> clients and people, some with OS 9, some without.  There's no 
>> technical or practical reason, nor any indication in my real world 
>> experience, that removing OS 9 from the system speeds things up.
>
> Agreed.

Well, at least we agree on *something*, Loren.  That's a start!!
--
Chris