[geeks] Anyone use XPostFacto?

[Sandwich Maker]

" From: "Geoffrey S. Mendelson" <gsm at mendelson.com>
" 
" 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 unsupported hardware, boot loader, but it does
" not work without an OS behind it.

i knew this.  i wasn't sure how much it re-wrote the mac boot process.

" 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. 

i knew this from the early days of my mother's imac; it came with both
10.0 and os9 on it.  i discovered the 'previous versions' folder after
my nephew 'blessed' os9 [his preference] during a visit and i wanted
to re-'bless' osx - 10.2 iirc - and to my surprise found the 'previous
versions' osx offered as a choice.  i didn't try it...

" 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. 

any reason you couldn't have 2 4000MB partitions, each with a different
osx version?  that's enough for 10.3 and a fair amount of stuff.

" 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.
" 
" []
" 
" 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.

crap, forgot about the master library folder...  osx doesn't have
anything like solaris' loopback and/or overlay mounts, does it?

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

it does.  anything that sheds light...
________________________________________________________________________
Andrew Hay                                  the genius nature
internet rambler                            is to see what all have seen
adh at an.bradford.ma.us                       and think what none thought