OSX only Boot In New year, What are Disk utils going to do?
So from (sometime in) January all new Mac's are only going to be able to boot OSX, no OS9 booting at all. What is going to happen to commercial disk utils like Norton and Disk Warrior? These apps require to be booted from a separate drive to do there disk repair activities. They currently ship with OS9 booting disks, but when OS9 boot is disabled, in hardware by Apple this is no longer going to be possible. Will apple create a special OSX for them (like boot's on the install disk), or will they be allowed to create there own? They can't expect users to create there own, via some util (not all users will have a CDR drive).
Comments
<strong>Disk Warrior will be OS X soon, I've heard.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Noton Disk Doc will already run in OSX, but you can only repair Non Boot drives, to repair the boot disk you have to start up using the Norton CD. This boot's in OS9 (a cut down with minimal extensions etc. created by Norton) This won't be able to happen with OSX only Mac's
<strong>what apple didn't tell you that OS 9 is still able to boot from a CD. it's just not able to boot from the harddisk. :cool: </strong><hr></blockquote>
That doesn't make any sense. Future Macs are going to require new drivers, and Apple is not going to write those drivers for OS 9. It doesn't matter what you're booting from; if you don't have drivers it's not going to work.
However i am not an engineer. We will see in just one month.
Defiant : how is your PC ?
I'm not sure how the logistics work either, unless the disabling is merely in Open Firmware, with an exception granted if the person's booting from CD. That should be well within OF's capabilities. That means no radical architectural changes right off the bat if it's true.
If it's not true, then we can only hope that Apple has figured out a way to stuff a bootable OS X onto a CD with room for an application. It's not enough for the disk repair utilities to be OS X native - they have to be able to boot off an alternate drive in case the internal HDD is kaput.
Or maybe Apple expects people to boot off of FW HDDs instead of CDs? I so, I wish them luck with that shift in strategy. They're going to need it.
[ 12-08-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>
<strong>(...) Defiant : how is your PC ?</strong><hr></blockquote>
more or less alive: he crashed on the first day I had it, and I found out that I'm not as productive at home as at work.
<strong>(...) Apple has figured out a way to stuff a bootable OS X onto a CD with room for an application. </strong><hr></blockquote>
they have. look at Drive 10 from Micromat (drive10.com)
<strong>
they have. look at Drive 10 from Micromat (drive10.com)</strong><hr></blockquote>
Ah. Good news. That takes care of that, then.
Thanks for the heads up.
<strong> I imagine even next year's machines will technically be able to boot into OS 9.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Not if Apple does some sort of firmware hack to stop OS9 even being recognized as a boot volume.
But if drive 10 comes on a OSX bootable CD it must have been solved.
There is a util that will create a boot CD but it uses all sorts of ugly 'ram disk' hacks for the folders that need to be write enabled.
<strong>... They currently ship with OS9 booting disks, but when OS9 boot is disabled, in hardware by Apple this is no longer going to be possible. </strong><hr></blockquote>
'disabled'? heheh
This will be done by 'them'. You know, the bad people who are out to get you.
Did you also hate it when they 'disabled' support for leaded gasoline in passenger cars? Damn them! How dare they disable leaded gasoline in hardware!
Doesn't is seem more likely that OS9 will not run on new models (note the wording of the original announcement) because of a more significant architecture change? If you think OS9 will run on the PPC970 without any changes to the code, explain to me why it is that System 7 will not boot natively on my dual G4. Support for the CPU has to exist in the system software and development for OS9 has ended. In case you missed the eulogy, OS9 is dead for Apple's developers. Apple won't have to do any kinds of firmware hacks to stop OS9 from booting on the PPC970; it simply won't boot anyway.
For the products that won't be getting the PPC970, sure, Apple may fiddle with the firmware.
That said, yes, it is already possible to boot OSX on a CD. After all, the installer does. As mentioned, so does Drive 10. Also, Alsoft is rumored to release an update to DiskWarrior this month that will be completely OSX-native. You can even create your own OSX boot CD with a working Finder. Charles (the guy that made Pacifist) wrote <a href="http://www.charlessoft.com/" target="_blank">BootCD</a> to do this.
I don't really see this being a major problem.