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Unable to Partition, Reformat or Unmount Drive

My customer refuses to learn new systems. He's still using system 9.2.2 to produce weekly color newspaper ads with PhotoShop 7 and Illustrator. I put him in a 1.25 MDD G4 as it is the last machine to be able to boot from OS9 a few years ago. I do have have 10.4.11 installed so he can run it classic mode. He prefers to boot straight into OS 9 as his colors get washed out when using CS2 and InDesign. I'm attempting to install a 240GB OWC Mercury Pro Legacy 3.5" IDE/ATA SSD Internal Drive. I cloned the old drive and all works well in 10.4.11 and Classic Mode. The OS 9 is blessed. The problem is in booting directly into OS 9. I think the problem is the hard drive limitation size of OS 9. I seem to remember that it was around 120 GB. On boot I get the Old Mac machine icon with smily face but it just hangs there. When I boot from the standard 120 GB hard drive into OS 10 and go to Disk Utilities the drive will not partition or erase because it won't unmount. I am trying to split the new drive into two 120 GB partitions. Any ideas? Here's what I am working with, it appears to be a standard SSD drive with an adapter with master, slave & cable select jumpers and a molex splitter, it came pre-formatted Apple partition map: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDMX...

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OWC tech support has heard of OS 9 but never seen it, was of no help. The designer obviously never did an installation into a dual drive machine. I'll solve the problems and post the answers. Installation guides on OWC are not for this "not ready for prime time" drive.

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Sorry Mayer just seeing your Q now. I'm on the road and will post something when I get home. Do you have a bootable leopard or snow leopard drive? I vaguely remember needing to use an older OS to prep the drive.

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Thanks Dan. It is a dual drive set up. The old standard drive has 10.4.11 & OS 9 on it. Both are individually bootable. When booted in 10.4, Disk Utilities would not allow dismount of the drive to do anything. I removed the drive and the adapter, put it in a MacPro carrier for a 2.5" drive and put it in a MacPro 2008 running 10.10.3. Now I could partition it. I split it into. Put it back into the MDD. Used SuperDuper to clone it onto the #1 partition. Am now attempting to get it to boot. I may have ID conflicts. The instruction do not give the orientation of the adapter well enough to know if up or down. Disconnected old drive and am attempting to get it to work as a master. Will let you know my results. Will have to determine ID by trial & error.

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Here's one reference: Mac OS X: Mac OS Extended format (HFS Plus) volume and file limits. Still looking for my older OS9 stuff - paper notes ;-}

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Though I would bump this unanswered question as more people are now using SSD drives.

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