Putting OS 9 Drivers Safely Onto A Hard Drive With Panther On It:

Question

It does not have OS 9 drivers. I do not have any Panther CDs. or Tiger CDs. My hard drive enclosures have arrived and I got all the files organized and I put OS 9 drivers on 120gb Maxtor and also 20gb western digital that used to have Windows 98 on it...I put OS 9 drivers on that.
The only two hard drives that do not have OS 9 drivers is that NTFS formatted one, and also the hard drive with 10.3.9 only.
That hard drive is being used in an imac g3. Right now I only have two working imac g3s and nothing else works.
=======
I am nervous about this, but can I take the imac2 hard drive out, temporarily put it in an enclosure, connect the enclosure to the imac1 with a hard drive containing OS 9 drivers & OS 9.2.2 & OS 10.3.9, log into 9.2.2, back up the entire "external" hard drive, erase it, put OS 9 drivers on it, and move the backed up files back onto it and also stick OS 9.2.2 on it also, take it out of the enclosure, and put it back in the imac2?????
Or should I buy OS X CDs??????????????
Is it possible to install with an external DVD drive?????????
Will the external DVD drive need a fire wire cable?????????
Can I buy a slot-loading DVD drive to put into the imacs???????????

Answer 1

OS 9 Drivers are installed prior to any other software, usually.
If a drive has partitions on it, installing drivers to only one of
these partitions may be possible, but they are on an OS 9
installer or on an OS X installer in the case of pre-10.5 OS X.
You can use OS9 as Classic, a non-boot use of system 9
under Mac OS X. This does not require OS 9 Drivers to use.
But dual-booting or booting OS 9 off a drive needs drivers.
If you are running an OS X version and have no installer disc
you essentially have no license to run it; and no way to be
able to maintain or reinstall the system correctly. You can't
drag & drop install Mac OSX. That requires clone utilities
in order to move a bootable copy of OS X (to external FW.)
Tiger being the last supported OS X version for Classic and
also for dual-boot computers which can support OS9 & OSX.
Panther install discs have a feature when the OS is first installed
to add those OS 9 Drivers; and an OS 9 installer also has the
ability to install OS 9 Drivers.
And in older iMac G3 computers, some did not get the required
Firmware update; so that would be installed with OS 9 running
the computer, installed on the hard disk drive.
Some vendors may still have replacement or upgrade optical
drives capable of booting an iMac G3 from an installer DVD.
Check OWC web page, or MCE, these offered drive upgrades.
So, unless you have an OS 9 installer, or an OS X installer with
the OS 9 Drivers install feature, getting those drivers is next to
impossible. Moving the hard disk drive around won't do it.
And having an OS X already on a drive, means you can't just
install OS 9 drivers that late in the game.
(But you can transfer files between Macs in several ways; one
with a FireWire cable, if the Mac you want files from is booted
into FireWire Target Disk Mode, it appears like an external drive
& the second Mac you want to drag a file into, is running normal.
No removing a drive to just get info from the Mac to another.)
You would need a FireWire cable for an external DVD drive, and
also for FW Target Disk Mode. The USB1.1 is way too slow for
using any external drive, hard disk or optical, with older Macs.
A bootable external drive would be FireWire, not USB 2.0 or 1.1.
For other transfers, you may need to get a special Ethernet cable.
Good luck & happy computing!
{ edited 3x }