[geeks] Anyone use XPostFacto?

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 11:17:43AM -0400, Sandwich Maker wrote:
>in my limited experience - when you reinstall osx it leaves your old
>installation in the 'previous versions' folder, still bootable.  does
>installing 10.4 [for example] with xpostfacto still do this?  i'm not
>interested in keeping os9 around but it sure seems like a good idea to
>have a natively-supported os available!

Xpostfacto is not a bootable program. It's a fake out "new world" ROMS,
patch the Kernel to work on unsuported hardware, boot loader, but it does
not work without an OS behind it.

It can work with OS9 or OSX.

Since from a boot perspective OS9 and OSX (oldworld) 10.0-10.2 work the same 
way, I'll just describe it once. 

When you boot the computer, the ROM looks for a location to boot and what to
boot in PRAM. It then loads the disk drivers (same for OS9 and oldworld OSX)
from a hidden partition on the disk. The drivers look for something to boot,
either a MacOS system or an oldworld OSX kernel and boot it.

So you have to have a bootable native OS in the first partition, and that
partition has to be within the first 8000 megabytes. 

You can only have one bootable system on a disk, the system folder has to
be "blessed". Back in the days where I had multiple system folders in the same
partition, I had to use a program to remove the "blessing" from one folder and
bless an other when I wanted to switch them. 

If you already have an OS9 system installed in a partition, the OSX
installer will leave it there and OSX will use it for Classic mode.

AFAIK, you can't have two versions of OSX in the same partition,
but I may be wrong. From what I have seen about the file structure it
uses, it would become confused. 

Now here's the tricky part. If you have OS9 and a nonbootable OSX in
the same partition, you are fine. If OSX was installed using XPostFacto,
and properly set up, when OS9 boots, XPostFacto will fake out what needs
to be faked and boot OSX as if it were booted native.
To you it will appear that OSX was booted natively. 

If for some reason you can no longer boot OSX, for example, software update
replaces modules replaced by XPostFacto, you will have to reboot into OS9.
The easiest way for me was to remove the power cord and battery from laptops,
I've never actually done it with a desktop. I assume that minimally you would
have to zap PRAM, you may have to hit the CUDA button, or remove the battery.

Another way that has worked for me is to just keep rebooting and let it
crash or hang, eventually it resets itself and reboots in OS9.

You could also take the direct action approach and never let OSX boot on it's
own. When OS9 boots, you open XPostFacto, and boot OSX, but don't change
the boot setting. This may be easier or harder for you depending upon how
often you want to use OS9. 


>i like the idea of a root partition, a users partition, and an
>applications partition if it turns out you need more than one root...

I don't know if you can do that. I've certainly never done it, and it will
waste a lot of disk space because lots of things want to be installed in
the root partition.

I hope this helps, I feel like I've confused you more.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM