First: If you see in the documentation for OS X Tiger (that's Mactinosh operating system number 10.4) that there is a disc that comes with Tiger that includes the old System 9, you are being lied to. Such a disc may well have come with Leopard and Panther (10.3 and 10.2), but I can attest that there is no such disk in the Tiger DVD retail box. You will need your old System 9 cds if you plan to use any System 9 programs.

Second: if you install System 9.1 within Tiger as instructed, and try to start Classic mode, it will hang forever (tested for values of forever <= 1 hr) at the part where it says "Welcome to Mac OS". What you need to do is upgrade it to System 9.2.1 or 9.2.2 and you can download the upgrade files from Apple (if you want 9.2.2, you must first upgrade to 9.2.1, then upgrade again to 9.2.2). However, the upgrade files are themselves System 9 programs, which of course you can't run if you have a DOA (dead on arrival) System 9.1 inside of OS X. The solution is to set the whole thing up as dual boot, boot into 9, upgrade, then boot back into X. From that point, you can run some System 9 programs in OS X (but not Final Cut Pro).

Third: if you partition a drive using the OS X tools, you must use the "IncludeOS9Drivers" option or else the entire hard drive will be invisible to any System 9 tools (like the install CD), even though OS X tools will see it fine. This item actually is documented in the fine print, and I saw it, but forgot to do it the first time.

So, if you have a Mac that didn't come with OS X, and you want to put OS X on it, here is one method that works:

• Buy an external hard drive. Firewire is good.
• Copy everything to that hard drive
• Reboot with the OS X DVD in the drive (hold down C during boot to force it to boot from the disc)
• Start Terminal from the boot disc, and use this command line to repartition the hard drive:

  disktool partitionDisk disc0 2 OS9Drivers HFS+ "System 9 Partition" 5G "Journaled HFS+" "OS X Partition" 20G

  This will give you a 5G System 9 partition and an OS X partition that will take up the rest of the hard drive. It will wipe everything on the disk.
• Proceed to install OS X in its designated partition.
• When complete (including reboots, etc), put in the System 9 disk and reboot to that (with the "C" trick)
• Install System 9 in its partition.
• Take out the disc and reboot back to System 9. To do that, hold down "D" immediately after the startup sound. This will make it boot to the first partition, which is the System 9 partition.
• Upgrade System 9 to 9.2.2
• Boot back into OS X (every time you boot, it will automatically go to X unless you hold down "D" for System 9 or "C" for the disc).
• Classic will now work normally.

(David Pogue's "Mac OS X Tiger Missing Manual" was very helpful for the rebooting part above, and seems generally to offer a "good pages of useful info"/dollar paid ratio.)

After the years I put in as Release Manager for OpenACS, a predominantly volunteer effort, I experience no small amount of schadenfreude to see such a fancy, polished Design Legend as Apple make such rudimentary mistakes as updating the 10.3 documentation to 10.4 by changing the numbers without re-checking the content, and producing upgrades that must be run one at a time, in sequence.