MacOS X in a fit of jealous rage, assassinated MacOS 9 (help!?)

Factual Questions
1

Well, it did. MacOS X (10.1.5 to be precise) is on one partition, MacOS 9 is on another, and various other operating systems are on yet other partitions.

One day I was booted into OS X and the GUI tanked, and, being without a 2nd computer to ssh in and do command-line tricks from afar, I had to reboot without a proper shutdown.

MacOS X came up fine (ran the obligatory auto-fsck at startup because of the improper shutdown). Then I switched Startup Volume to the OS 9 partition and rebooted, got a momentary happy-mac then an unprovoked reboot, a momentary no-System-Folder icon, then a happy-mac and a boot…into MacOS 8.6!

From MacOS 8.6, I ran Disk First Aid (“volume appears to be OK”), Norton Disk Doctor (“no problems found”), TechTool 3 (likewise), and DiskWarrior (replaced the directory but it reported no material differences). Tried to reboot into MacOS 9 – happy-mac, no-system, happy-mac, MacOS 8.6. Hmmph.

Pulled Finder out of System Folder. Put back in to re-bless the System Folder and perhaps fix up the hosed boot blocks (although the utility programs should’ve caught that). No joy, same results.

Did a fresh install of MacOS 9 and the 9.0.4 updater and moved the main booting files (Finder, System, System Resources) to the old System Folder, replacing the possibly corrupted versions. Reboot and this time MacOS 9 came up just fine.

Next time I rebooted: happy-mac, no-system, happy-mac, MacOS 8.6 again. Repeated process of above paragraph except that I saved the existing files and tested with them one at a time and by trial and error determined that it was the System file, specifically, that required replacement. Made backup copy of fresh new System file to avoid doing full OS reinstalls if this happens again.

Boy did it ever. I’ve had to replace the System file maybe 15 times. It is most likely to happen if I boot into MacOS X and then attempt to switch back to 9, but sometimes just from doing a restart. And my system isn’t hanging on shutdown or crashing or anything.

With a fresh install of MacOS 9 on disk, I’ve run Norton, DiskWarrior, TechTool, Disk First Aid, and the MacOS X Disk Utility on the OS 9 partition to no avail. (They all fail to find any problems to fix or report).

The ruined copies of the System file will not open (the file is a “suitcase” that normally opens to display the enclosed sounds and keyboard resources).

Other, perhaps related, symptoms: The computer loses track of the printer selection between restarts even when 9 boots successfully. Not switching to an incorrect printer but failing to have a selected printer. Go to “Print” in any application yields one of those “File cannot be printed because no printer has been selected in the Chooser” error messages. I have a set of QuicKeys macros that let me switch printers with a keystroke from LaserWriter 8 to Adobe PDFWriter to HP DeskWriter USB, but the macros don’t work until I manually open the Chooser and pick a printer. Also, every time the System file dies, I lose my Finder Labels settings (the custom names and colors). I suppose it is possible that these settings are actually maintained within the System file but I would not have thought so. I always assumed that was kept in Finder Preferences.

I do have the empty-disk resources to back up the whole partition with Retrospect, initialize it, and restore it, but then I’ll spend a day chasing down broken aliases, and a week coping with missing invisible application-registration files, re-entering serial numbers and whatnot as they fail at various rates to run w/o complaint.

'twould be nice if someone has a sense of what could be causing this behavior. What condition would make the System file in an active MacOS 9 System Folder volatile, such that it gets corrupted at the drop of a hat and requires replacement?

The other operating systems are not getting messed up in a similar fashion even when I run them for a couple of days (I used 8.6 for three days to see if there was some process afoot that was eating active system files). It only goes after the one on the MacOS 9 partition.

2

No good advice from me. If you don’t get an answer here though, check out the forums at Mac OSX Hints.

Good luck.

3

BTW, you will probably want to avoid running a version of Norton Disk Doctor in a classic operating system, as there is a good chance that it will not recognise the OSX/Linux operating system files as being ok (e.g. files with a period in front of them are not ok, etc…).

4

OS X is a BSD, not Linux. Unless she’s running Yellow Dog or another PPC Linux distro, she has no Linux system files on her computer.

5

That’s true, but I don’t run it against the OS X partition. It’s mostly benign when it comes to repairing directory structure, since both operating systems use HFS+.

The MacOS 9 partition doesn’t tend to be a repository of critical OS X files.

6

You could try removing all of the extra keyboards and sounds from the System folder.

You could try locking the system folder.

No guarantees – just a couple of ideas.

(you could say screw pre-OS X, but that doesn’t sound like an option).

Actually… anyone every tried getting the “Mac on Linux” project to run under OS X? I think it would be really swell to install Mac OS 9 in a non-integrated virtual machine rather than integrating it into the Mac OS X desktop experience. You know, like Virtual PC. Give the whole OS its own window. Then you’d probably be able to run Mac OS 9 from a disk image, and you’d never have to boot into it again on the real computer. The virtual machine would be “real” as far as Mac OS 9 is concerned, so you’d have the benefits of a root Mac OS 9 running inside of a Mac OS X-hosted virtual machine. Eliminate a lot of Classic incompatibilities that way, since it’s not Classic. The only problem is, it’s for Linux; it may need a lot of porting work.