Mac Forum / General / Portable Macs / November 2005

Works fine for everyone else, so someone has made a mistake.

There are two separate issues here.

If you buy a new Mac, it won't have the classic environment
pre-installed, but it is included as an optional installation on one of
the CDs or DVDs included with the computer.

I haven't actually seen one of these up close, but I expect it is a
standard Mac OS X installer, which creates the Mac OS 9 "System Folder"
and all associated pieces, and installs the necessary Mac OS X support
files for the Classic environment (if they aren't there already).

On an older computer which is able to boot Mac OS 9, it should have been
supplied with a bootable Mac OS 9 CD.  You must boot from that CD to
install Mac OS 9 on the hard drive, as the Classic environment (running
natively in Mac OS X) usually cannot start up from a system folder on a
read-only volume. (You can probably work around this by copying the CD
to a read/write disk image on the hard drive with sufficient space for
additional files, but this is a rather messy procedure and wasteful of
disk space.)

I assume there is no middle ground - computers which cannot boot Mac OS
9, but which only included Mac OS 9 in the form of a CD (or a disk image
of the Mac OS 9 CD on a DVD).

Install the Classic stuff from the Tiger DVD, if it's not already
installed on your machine.