Hi again! I'm sorry in advance for the incoming wall of text but I have to jot it down somewhere, because since it's with two PPC machines... I suppose that counts?
Okay so, right now I am trying to setup a network share between a Power Macintosh 7500 (upgraded with a Sonnet G3 Crescendo card) and my iMac G4... To load up the 7500 with software and whatnot... At least on paper that's what I'm trying to achieve but...
Unfortunately it didn't pan out as my G4 runs 10.4 and the 7500 runs 7.5.2, so I had to setup a netatalk (the 2.x fork) instance on my PC (and that alone was an exercise in frustration
), which worked but for some reason I couldn't open any of the files (?!?) with System 7 spitting the dummy and displaying an error message among the lines of "can't find the application which this file was created with".. Sigh.
(said message actually is "The document coul not be opened because the application program that created it could not be found." followed by "could not find a translation extension with the appropriate translators")
I tried to do it the "Sneakernet" way by writing floppies (simply put, I create a HFS disk image on my G4, then put it on a USB drive and transfer it to my backup PC [which annoyingly is at my grandparents' place, along with my iMac G3] which still has a FDD)... Nope, same error... But the thing is, I managed to get the Sonnet G3's driver installed that way, and now it doesn't work. I'm stumped and dumbfounded, to say the least.
Another thing, I can't even format any floppy disks with this Mac, if I try to format one as "Macintosh 1.44M", it spins the disk and seemingly formats fine but at the end it says the disk is damaged and if I try to format a MS-DOS floppy, it keeps trying endlessly, before saying that the formatting has failed. I don't know if my disks are bad (I'm using NOS disks) or if my drive is bad (which I would find surprising given it can read and write files just fine, just not format disks)
At this point, I am unsure how to proceed... I got two iomega drives (one Jaz 2 and a Zip100) but I don't have the correct adapter for the Jaz drive (I need a DB25 to HD50, I located one locally, just waiting on the guy to answer back), I'm thinking of doing the same sneakernet thingy I've done... Create a HFS image file on my iMac G4, transfer it to my backup PC, then install System 7 or OS 8 (I'll use SheepShaver with the IMG file I've created) then write the image file (using Linux's dd utility) to the Jaz drive.. Hopefully if all goes well the PMac should pick up the Jaz drive and boot from it.
I read at some point that MacOS 10.2 "Jaguar" could run the proper AFP share that system 7.5.2 can connect to, and that's precisely what my G4 came with... Except like a fool, I wiped the hard drive and installed 10.4 over it. But on the bright side... I thought of getting a FireWire external HDD and install jaguar on there, so that way I don't have to mess with the internal drive on my G4, especially since I'm only going to use 10.2 for AFP sharing with my 7500 (until I manage to update OpenTransport and AppleShare client on it which is what I've been trying to do for the past three days).
So close yet so far... I won't give up that
easily on this beige Power Macintosh.