your answer should be here:
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god that’s such a good URL
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oh, btw an easier way to get files into QEMU as more of a one-shot thing is just to create an .iso or disk image with your files on it and load that along with your qcow etc.
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i’ve got an AFP/AppleTalk fileshare working now on my old ASUS laptop running XigmaNAS 13. fucking hooray. i’m stoked
xigma is relatively easy to use. you can run it straight off a USB drive, only major limitation is it runs FreeBSD under the hood and absolutely insists you use UFS or ZFS, but for old hardware this is of no concern. now i have a fileshare open on my LAN that both my Windows 11 and Mac OS 8.6 machines can access. life’s good
except OS X is a piece of shit and is wildly unstable on my machine 
i believe it’s a combination of bad RAM and a bad optical drive that’s corrupting files during the install. i’ll get there, i’m ship of theseus’ing out the old and shitty
i even bought a pack of fucking zip disks to use with this thing. my 8.6 folder is like 180 MB, i need to cut that down to ~91 to make a bootable ZIP 
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i have a favor to ask
could anyone make a Mac OS X Disk Utility restore image of an installed copy of Mac OS X Tiger PPC (10.4.8 or 10.4.11 are preferred, any flavor of 10.4 is acceptable tho). alternately just point me in the direction of an image of a drive I can restore to one of my partitions. my G4’s optical drive is simply incapable of successfully installing OS X, it’s maddening. i just need to not have to use this horrifically awful OS X installer that insists on installing a truly absurd amount of shit i do not want it to install without asking - a bunch of languages i don’t speak, features i don’t want, just random crap. even system 7 installers from the early 90s let you freely customize what you did and didn’t want to install. what is this absolutely diabolical horseshit, apple. what is it. edit: actually i’m an idiot and you can turn off the language and printer driver options in the tiger installer. realizing this now might actually help me get the thing installed…
i assume no one actually can do this (because who has a clean bootable drive of 10.4 PPC ready to go), but i’m at wit’s end with this computer and OS X. what a miserable downgrade from OS 9, blegh. i get the modernizations and new features are nice, but the whole operating system is unstable and horrifically slow compared to classic Mac OS.
hypothetically i could do this in QEMU, but i don’t actually know how. nor do i know how i’d get the disk image out of QEMU after i made it
edit: hmmm, maybe i can just restore an installer dvd as a partition and see if it’ll actually install from that
I’m not sure I know how to do that. A lot of Mac fixing requires a working Mac.
https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/mac-osx-mac-os-10-ppc
I’m sure you looked through all that. Looks like just install disks.
Is this something I could do with toast? I have a working Ti Book and two G4 Mac mini’s running with 10.4.11 going
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the process is easy, the trick is having a drive you can image that isn’t A) utterly massive and/or B) full of your personal data/etc.
you can make a restore image of any drive on your machine via Apple Disk Utility (you don’t need Toast), or from most .dmg and .iso files (there are limitations to this which are not obvious, mostly that images from later versions of Disk Utility may not always be compatible with earlier versions)
…and since I can at least boot into OS X via one of the installer disks (despite the installation as a whole ultimately failing), I can use Disk Utility from 10.4 (which allows using HFS+ (Journaling)) and write the image directly to one of my partitions without needing to use the unspeakably terrible OS X installation process.
alright, I’m transferring a .dmg of the 10.4 DVD to my G4 via FTP now, hopefully this one will work (i tried an .iso of the DVD just now and Disk Utility gave an inscrutable error)
the plan is to restore the install DVD to a partition on a drive, then hopefully it lets me run the installer from the drive to install to another partition - bypassing the optical drive entirely and letting me boot into 10.4!
Is your optical drive busted? My 2007 MacBook woes were finally solved when I gave in and ordered a replacement optical drive. OWC seems to have good options:
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i dunno if it’s busted but it sucks ass. it might be useable with a thorough cleaning. i suspect there’s dust bunnies on the sensor.
but yeah, i wasn’t kidding about ship of theseus’ing this thing - i’ve got many things coming for this machine in the mail
- new pioneer optical drive
- 2GB RAM
- new old stock radeon 7000
already got those aforementioned zip disks, an IDE-to-SATA adapter, a PCI SATA card, new 3.6V 1/2 AA… i’m committed.
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man. early OS X is total dogshit. i’m not entirely absolving this G4, but what a nightmarish operating system. just inane, inexplicable decisions all over the place. i cannot express how much worse it feels to interact with any part of OS X on this machine. i’ve probably tried 20 different approaches at this point, and every single one has been foiled. again, the G4 is partly to blame, but it wouldn’t matter if the OS X installers weren’t deranged pieces of software - it took a single attempt to install 8.6 from CD, and a single attempt to install 9.2.2 from CD. Both systems are stable and functional.
but OS X… no. i fucking despise it!
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oh yeah it absolutely was not good before Panther
MacOS in between 7.6 and 10.3 was pretttttty irrelevant, but then between Panther and the release of Intel Macs it took over the world
that was only a 6 year gap somehow, it felt much longer
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yeah, and panther is the one that absolutely turbofucked Classic mode
I have (had?) an old iBook G4 on I think Tiger (10.4) that’s at least been able to run OS9 Office apps as needed with the builtin emulation layer, but I never taxed it very far beyond that
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10.2.8 is the last version of Classic that isn’t shit. there was no point to this change other than to artificially drive more people to OS X
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I remember really liking the OSX beta then 10.0 came out and holy shit it was so sluggish and bad.
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That reminds me one of the worst computer experiences I’ve ever had was upgrading a candy-colored iMac to an early version of OS X.
The OS X installer itself ran in an unsupported resolution so 10 seconds after booting into the install disc, the iMac’s monitor went black. It was ~permanently bricked. There was no way to fix this problem with normal methods like rebooting or factory reset. The only way was to plug in an external monitor on the iMac’s hidden VGA port, then boot into OS 9 and install the latest monitor firmware. And the firmware upgrade tool required the latest version of OS 9 so I had to also upgrade OS 9 itself first (which in turn had some other dependencies I’ve forgotten at this point).
After all that fear and trouble, OS X was dogshit slow yeah
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there’s a developer preview of OS X that lets you run Classic mode in fullscreen, with a desktop even (iirc). great feature, shame it didn’t make it to retail
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it is kind of miraculous for them that G3 iMacs sold at all because they were purely transitional products, not that fast or competitive with PCs of the day, zero longevity compared to the Macs that they’d subsequently release from 2003-2015, and if you bought one in say 2001 (when they were still getting hardware updates) you were ideally suited to never ever update the software on them
but they were received as a lifeline anyway
the G4s were largely slow and expensive and deprecated relatively quickly but they were released when OSX at least had good GPU acceleration and they themselves had modern GPUs so they were vastly more usable through the aughts, especially as OSX software got dramatically better than anyone’s
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Yeah, most PC enthusiasts including myself scoffed at them until that 2003 era. But I also knew several of the type of guy who would buy them. It was often middle-aged types with a bit of extra money to throw around and who had kept alive in their heart the dream created by Apple’s early-80s marketing.
Steve Jobs’ name + cool-looking exterior design alone wasn’t enough to go mainstream or even premium-mainstream yet, but it was enough to get the hidden worshipers back to church and arrest Apple’s death spiral
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