Cloning disk from image to New World Mac

[Jose64141]

I want to try MOSX Server 1.0 on my iMac G4
The CD doesn't boot, so I've been thinking on installing it on QEMU and cloning the partition to the HDD
Is that possible?

[MrBurgerKing]

Driver compatibility and differences in internal architecture with supported devices unfortunately means a copy-paste job probably wouldn't work. In order to run it inside QMEU, you have to emulate one of a handful of supported g3 device anyway.

[Jose64141]

I know
But my idea is to use a program like Gparted to copy the partition
And I have another question
If I put the iMac in target disk mode, and connect it to my PC with a FW card, The system would recognize it? Would it be safe to work?
(If that is possible, I'm thinking to put the iMac as an HDD on QEMU and from there install MOSX)

[MrBurgerKing]

Target disk mode should work ok, but installing osx server 1.0 onto it probably wouldn't work anyway. It will only run on a handful of g3 models, and won't on a g4. In order to install it, you have to emulate a g3, so every time it boots it will expect a g3. 1.2 supports the emac, so copy-paste has a slightly higher chance of working if it's set up and configured using a g4 emac since they are more similar; at least they share similar processors where the emulated one in qmeu is totally different.

[SistemaRayoXP]

So if there are any emulators of the eMac (Which I think there aren't), it could be possible to, like MrBurgerKing said, "copy-paste the HD"

[louisw3]

OS X isn't like MacOS 9/8/7 etc, it's all Unix based, (XNU/Mach/BSD etc), so it doesn't suffer from the same driver / system platform hell. That said the hardware that OS X Server 1.x supports is incredibly small. 1.0 was basically a G3 only release, and more so for the B&W G3, along with some beige models.

1.2/1.2v3 added *SOME* G4 model support, however again actual platform support was quite restrictive.

You can use Qemu to mount a physical disk, and install to that, I was able to install MacOS 9.1 onto a nano SD card, put that into a micro SD, which in turn I put into a micro SD to laptop IDE adapter, and plug all that into a TiBook, and it booted up fine. (The DVD drive in the TiBook is broken, and the ancient 20GB disk was failing).

So yeah, you can *try* to install OS X Server and see if it'll boot on your physical machine, but don't expect anything to work. For what it's worth, I put 10.2 onto my TiBook, which runs snappy enough for me.

[WwOS]

For more G4 support I suggest trying Mac OS X Developer Releases 1 and 2. They still look very similar to Rhapsody and they effectively still are Rhapsody. Starting with Developer Release 3 it became what we know today, the Aqua look of Mac OS X.

As for cloning the discs: be aware that Rhapsody (as well as Mac OS X DP1 and DP2) use a separate boot partition. Cloning should be possible, but not easy to say the least.

On Mac OS X I used Carbon Copy Cloner for full partition images of Mac OS X which can later be restored on any other partition on a disk, on any other Mac. On the target system first run Disk Utility and create the partition(s) you want to restore your Mac OS X clone to. Then, all that is needed is either Target Disk Mode or to temporarily connect the HDD on another Mac via USB or FireWire, or to have a (temporary) Mac OS X installed that will be used to restore the cloned installation, or to boot from an external (FireWire) HDD that has a version of Mac OS X installed, that is used to restore the image created with Carbon Copy Cloner. Sounds complicated but really is not, since Mac OS X has everything it needs to boot on this one single partition. Once it is restored you're good to go (say: to boot from this partition on the target Mac).

Again, Rhapsody used more partitions, so you'd have to manually save and restore the boot partition. And then it remains unclear wheather this cloned disk would still be able to boot. Just imagine that a partition number shifted, so this boot configuration could easily be already corrupted... Not an easy call...

The only thing I imagine could work is to use a full image and restore it completely. You could do that without the image if you connect the internal HDD using an adapter to a modern computer, say, via USB, and use this in "raw" mode as the image for you QEMU installation attempt. This would most likely create a working installation. Either way: Not trivial to do!