Merge OS9 and OSX Partitions into One with SD

[sdsl]

On my wife's older model iMac G3, there is an internal 20 Gb hard disk and it's partitioned into a 4.5 Gb partition with OS9, and a 14.5 Gb partition with OSX (10.3.9). The OS9 partition is called "Macintosh HD" and the OSX partition is called "Macintosh HDII". The machine came with this partition scheme, I wouldn't have chosen to do that, but she won it in a sweepstakes so who could complain?

Anyway, I'd like to make SuperDuper backups of each of these two partitions (I have multiple external firewire drives), then re-format and re-partition so I have a single 20 Gb disk to be named "Macintosh HD".

Two questions:

1) If I first restore (with SD) the backed up OSX partition to the new freshly formatted 20 Gb disk, can I then just drag and drop all the backed up OS9 stuff to that new disk then and be able to boot from either OS9 or OSX on that now single drive? Or should I use SD to restore the OS9 backup as well? I thought that OS9 has some hidden files that might not get copied with a drag and drop.

2) Would there be complications from the end state of using SD to first backup the OSX partition and then restore it to a newly formatted disk that has a different name (Macintosh HD) versus the original OSX partition name (Macintosh HDII)?

SD seems to be ideal for this process but it's not clear to me the best way to proceed to backup two partitions and then restore them both back to what is now a single, larger partition (i.e. merge two partitions into one larger one).

[dnanian]

I believe an OS9 install can be drag/dropped as it could under OS9, so it's worth a try. If it doesn't work, you can do a regular copy for the OSX partition, and then a "Copy Different" to "add" the other partition's contents, assuming no file or folder conflicts.

[j.a.duke]

OS 9 will work as a drag-copy 99% of the time, so give it a go.

The only thing you might need to do is open up the OS 9 System folder so the OS "sees" the Finder & System files resident together. If the folder is already "badged" with the correct icon this won't be necessary.

I've done similar (mostly on iMac G5s w/o Classic installed) and not had any trouble.

Cheers,
Jon