...nothing more than the OSX command line, iPartition, SuperDuper!, a Microdrive, a CF to IDE converter, a card reader, an external HDD enclosure, a bottle of cheapass "orangeade" a pizza, and some prescription drugs.

I finally figured out all how this works. I wanted to switch my Mac OS 9 installation from a noisy ass 4gb IBM HD to a lovely little 4 gb Hitachi Microdrive. Actually that wasn't the plan, I wanted to do it with a 2gb CF card, but that got suck-ass speed.


1. Insert the card using your chosen method. I used a PCMCIA CF card reader. Open disk Utility and get the name of your card ie. /dev/rdisk4. Ignore the /dev/r - you just need disk 4.

2 Partition the Card. Type this into terminal.diskutil partitionDisk disk4 1 OS9Drivers HFS+ Microdrive 4 GB

This installs all the invisible apple partitions, and makes a single HFS+ segment of whatever size you want. In this case we made a 4gb partition.

3. Make sure it's all good using iPartition. All the free space should be used, and only driver partitions on the original disc should be retained. The Main partition should take up most of the free space, and should have all checkboxes clicked, apart from "chainable".

3. Copy the system over using "Superduper!" or CarbonCopyCloner. This is doable using ditto from the command line, but really, who bothers.

4. "Bless" the System Folder.
sudo bless -folder9 "/Volumes/Micredrive/System Folder" -bootBlockFile "/usr/share/misc/bootblockdata"

5. Plug in and enjoy a faster, silent OS 9!

Um, cool?