What have you done with a PowerPC today?

[Doq]

Any thermal issues? Mine got incredibly hot whilst I was trying it out.

It does get a bit warm, but it's not dangerously hot; though it may be due to the lighter workload.

 

[Jack Neill]

Procured 2 512 SSDs from Bezos, setup a Raid 0, put a 10.5.6 installer on a SSD booted the MB 2,1 from it and then put the G5 in Target, now installing OS X. I love Macintosh.

 

[TheShortTimer]

@Jack Neill Can you elaborate about the RAID 0 set up please? As you can see in my signature, I own a PM G5 so I'm curious about this.

 

[Jack Neill]

@Jack Neill Can you elaborate about the RAID 0 set up please? As you can see in my signature, I own a PM G5 so I'm curious about this.

I used 2 512 SP Amazon special SSD's put them into a Raid 0 with Raid Assistant on my MBP 9,2 running 11.6.3. This may have been a bad idea to use Big Sur to create it. My idea of Leopard install I just posted failed, the installer crashed. I am now trying to CCC a Tiger image on to it from Tiger on a MB 2,1.

 

[Amethyst1]

This may have been a bad idea to use Big Sur to create it.

Using Big Sur for anything is a bad idea.

Just joking, but… why don’t you use Disk Utility after booting into the Tiger or Leopard installer on the G5 to set up the RAID? That’s how it was meant to be done back in the day.

 

[Amethyst1]

Can you elaborate about the RAID 0 set up please? As you can see in my signature, I own a PM G5 so I'm curious about this.

Disk Utility has a “RAID” tab. Just drag the drives to use into the array field, set the type (striped for RAID 0), create the set and done.

 

[Jack Neill]

Using Big Sur for anything is a bad idea.

Just joking, but… why don’t you use Disk Utility after booting into the Tiger or Leopard installer on the G5 to set up the RAID? That’s how it was meant to be done back in the day.

I don’t know. I just don’t think these things through.. lol.

 

[Amethyst1]

I don’t know. I just don’t think these things through.. lol.

Just in case Mac OS X refuses to install on the striped volume, clone an installation from another volume. That's how I did it with my G4 mini in 2005, when the "craptastic" idea of RAIDing the internal hard drive and an external FireWire drive occurred to me.

 

[Jack Neill]

Just in case Mac OS X refuses to install on the striped volume, clone an installation from another volume. That's how I did it with my G4 mini in 2005, when the "craptastic" idea of RAIDing the internal hard drive and an external FireWire drive occurred to me.

I am having problems, I burned a Tiger and Leopard DVD, the Tiger one will either freeze the Mac at the splash screen or make it halfway though install before freezing the Mac, the Leo disc just perpetually loads and never gets to the splash. I decided a brute force approach would work and I took the 2 drives out and mounted the raid on another Mac and CCCed a Tiger image to it, I put the drives back in but the G5 doesn't even see the raid now. The Mac worked fine with the spinners it came with but I haven't given up on my G5 Flash storage dream.

 

[Amethyst1]

I am having problems, I burned a Tiger and Leopard DVD, the Tiger one will either freeze the Mac at the splash screen or make it halfway though install before freezing the Mac, the Leo disc just perpetually loads and never gets to the splash.

Do you get the same behaviour with just one SSD installed in the G5?
None of these issues with the spinners?

 

[Jack Neill]

Do you get the same behaviour with just one SSD installed in the G5?
No issues at all with the spinners?

No issues with the platters, haven't tried 1 SSD by itself yet. I just burned a 10.2.7 G5 disc from the garden and it booted fine, redid the Raid in Jags DU and now its installing, fingers crossed..

EDIT: Now I am stumped, Jag installed but the Mac freezes up after it tries to boot, I broke the Raid and tried a single drive with the same result.

 

[Amethyst1]

EDIT: Now I am stumped, Jag installed but the Mac freezes up after it tries to boot, I broke the Raid and tried a single drive with the same result.

Try booting verbosely by holding [Command]-[V] after turning on. What's the last message on screen when it freezes? It could be an incompatibility between the G5's SATA controller and the SSDs.

 

[Jack Neill]

Try booting verbosely by holding [Command]-[V] after turning on. What's the last message on screen when it freezes? It could be an incompatibility between the G5's SATA controller and the SSDs.

It hangs on returning curPRAM vol = 3

 

[MacPro2006VBox]

Try booting verbosely by holding [Command]-[V] after turning on. What's the last message on screen when it freezes? It could be an incompatibility between the G5's SATA controller and the SSDs.

This is why I go with WD Blue SSDs. Don’t have a problem with those.

 

[Jack Neill]

This is why I go with WD Blue SSDs. Don’t have a problem with those.

I think there is something wrong with it, I put the WD spinner back in and now it freezes up as soon as it get to the blue screen of the Tiger install. I did the CMD/OPT/P/R about 5 times and it also won't go into target anymore either. This happened to my 12" G4 one time and it sucked, I tried to get it to go to OF but it won't boot into OF either to just stays at a black screen.

 

[xbpr]

I attached a VCR to a Canon ZR-40 video camera and connected that to a 17” PowerBook G4 via FireWire to capture some old video tapes in iMovie.

The first two tapes went smooth, but I was fighting iMovie crashes and camera disconnects for the next two. I’m going to shut it down and try it again next weekend.

 

[lepidotós]

Sullied its "pristine" exterior with an oath of allegiance to my favorite state. Kinda unhappy with the placement, but it's already on there, so I csn't try again until I get another sticker.
​

 

[bobesch]

Not quite PPC-only:
"Running Sneakers-Network with iomega ZiP100, PCMCIA/CF-Cards and Floppy-Disks"

In the game are PPC-G3(os9) // 68k-Macintosh (os7) // HP-Omnibook430 (Win3.11)

So far have been running:
Ethernet (AFP;SMB): PowerBookG3 Wallstreet (os9)<>PPC<>intelMacs
LocalTalk or PhoneNet with telephone-cord(AppleTalk;TCP/IP): 68k-Macintosh <> PB-G3 Wallstreet/PDQ
CF-Card with adapter (a)PCMCIA; (b)FireWire; (c)USB: Omnibook(a); PowerBookG3(a); Wallstreet (os9) (a/b*); PPC(a/b**); intelMac(a); Windows 98SE-Win10(c)
[(*)with PCMCIA-FW-Adapter; (**) 15/17"PowerBookG4 with PCMCIA-Slot]
3,5"Floppies (ext.FloppyDrives): Onmibook (parallel /w passthrough); PPC (USB); intel (USB)

New in game:
ZiP100-Drive (SCSI; Parallel; USB): 68k Macintosh (SCSI); Omnibook (Parallel); PowerBooksG3 (SCSI); PowerMacG4 (internal); all PPC/intel (USB; maybe Parallel2USB-adapter-cable*); Windows 98SE-Win10(USB; maybe Parallel2USB-adapter-cable*)
[(*) not checked yet]
My 2nd-hand USB-ZiP drive seems to be close to EOL, is noisy and seems worn-out and transmission/connection gets lost very often. I guess, those USB-ZiP100 drives from the early iMacG3-era were under heavy use in media-productive environments, while the ZiP100P-drives still run smooth and reliable, because a lot of them were probably only in personal use and under low loads ... So I hope, that my a USB-Paralell-Adapter-cable will be of any help ...

The Wallstreet/PDQ proved to be by far my most versatile machine to serve as the primary hub to connect to all sorts of Macs and Windows-PC of all generations that I 'm able to tinker with ...
- 68k-Macs: SCSI-ZiP100; 3,5"-Floppy; LocalTalk-Network
- PPC: Ethernet-Network (WLAN-Ethernet-Bridge), PCMCIA-Cards (CF-Card-Reader, FireWire-Adapter; USB2.0-Adapter; USB-Floppy-Drive; USB-Power-Source for WLAN-Ethernet-Bridge), CD-Rom, ZiP100-Drive (SCSI)
- intel-Macs: Ethernet-Network (WLAN-Ethernet-Bridge), PCMCIA-Cards (FireWire-Adapter for TDM; CF-Card-Reader; USB2.0-Adapter; USB-Power-Source for WLAN-Ethernet-Bridge), CD-Rom, ZiP100-Drive (USB)
- Windows: Ethernet-Network (WLAN-Ethernet-Bridge); PCMCIA-Cards (CF-Card-Reader USB2.0-Adapter; USB-Floppy-Drive; USB-Power-Source for WLAN-Ethernet-Bridge); CD-Rom, ZiP100-Drive (Parallel-Port on PC-side)

credits go to www.knubbelmac.de , that holds a precious of great information about 68k Macintosh and the ways how to get them connected.

 

[Amethyst1]

So I hope, that my USB-Paralell-Adapter-cable will be of any help

Please share your experience. Those parallel-port Zip drives are actually SCSI drives with a built-in Parallel-to-SCSI adapter, so I’m very curious whether daisy-chaining a USB-to-Parallel adapter will work — and, in a general sense, if USB-to-Parallel adapters are only good for printers or if they can cope with more exotic devices as well (looks at parallel-port MMC card reader).

 

[bobesch]

Please share your experience. Those parallel-port Zip drives are actually SCSI drives with a built-in Parallel-to-SCSI adapter, so I’m very curious whether daisy-chaining a USB-to-Parallel adapter will work — and, in a general sense, if USB-to-Parallel adapters are only good for printers or if they can cope with more exotic devices as well (looks at parallel-port MMC card reader).

Oh, that makes me curious and I'm keen to give it a try tonight (supposed I'll find that forgotten treasure, that was last in use last seen years ago.

Edit:
The USB-Printer-Adapter-Cable prooved to be a Centronics, not an ordinary Parallel ...
Found ZiP750 Disks. So there must be a ZiP750-Drive with USB2.0 and compatibility to ZiP100 somewhere hidden on our attic. Surprise, surprise. It more than 15y ago that I retired that drive in favor to first mobile hard drives and then sorts of MemoryCards, USB-Sticks or even the spare memory of a mobile phone.
Third finding: a softcase with PCMCIA-CFCcard-Adapter, several CF- and SD-Cards, that belong to my favorite TRGpro (CFCards) and PalmOS-devices (SDCard). Unfortunately time isn't on the side of PalmOS-enthusiasts, since the PalmOS calender will cease to work from at time about 2031.

 

[galgot]

I always used Google mostly because it's by default on Safari up there, and didn't thought much about it. But really with that other project I was working on (trying to find peoples in old press articles, and precise sources), I got more consistent result using others, like Duckduckgo, and Qwant.
Google show results related to your search picking words and showing mostly the most recent stuff (which is not what you want if you search in old stuff), or related to businesses... Can really see how the searches are twisted to show you what they want, not really what you are looking for.

Anyways, back to PPC. And talking about MacMini G4, mine serving as a small files server with three 1Tb disks attached,
is reaching a year uptime in 17 days (Wouhooooo! )

View attachment 1948212

Well well... That MacMini did reach a year uptime.
Until today.
My power provider send a technician to make some repairs to my electricity meter. And he cut the power.
had no time to power the MacMini off. happened before, but it had no problem booting up these previous times...
This time no. I've 3 beeps at boot. Checked what that means : 3 beeps = no good banks.
So opened it and reseated the RAM, cleaned a bit... still no joy. Beep beep beep...
I think to reset PMU on a Mini g4 one has to unplug power and press power button for 5 sec ? not sure.
Any confirmation on that ?
Anyway tried that too. still not booting.
Hope the power brick is not fried... :/

 

[galgot]

Well well... That MacMini did reach a year uptime.
Until today.
My power provider send a technician to make some repairs to my electricity meter. And he cut the power.
had no time to power the MacMini off. happened before, but it had no problem booting up these previous times...
This time no. I've 3 beeps at boot. Checked what that means : 3 beeps = no good banks.
So opened it and reseated the RAM, cleaned a bit... still no joy. Beep beep beep...
I think to reset PMU on a Mini g4 one has to unplug power and press power button for 5 sec ? not sure.
Any confirmation on that ?
Anyway tried that too. still not booting.
Hope the power brick is not fried... :/

Whew! The power brick isn't fried... Problem was indeed the memory. That power off apparently damaged the installed 1gb RAM module. He just doesn't want it anymore. So installed an 512Mo module, zapped Pram several times, and all good Maybe for another year ?

Then on another PPC, a 1Ghz Ti , I tried compiling SheepShaver on Debian 7 Wheezy... but gave some errors.
So rebooted on the Tiger partition, and installed Unreal to console me ...

 

[galgot]

Sullied its "pristine" exterior with an oath of allegiance to my favorite state. Kinda unhappy with the placement, but it's already on there, so I csn't try again until I get another sticker.
View attachment 1955407​

What is that flag please ?

 

[lepidotós]

@galgot New Mexico! I've been there numerous times and Las Cruces is honestly probably where I want to move after college.​

 

[galgot]

@galgot New Mexico! I've been there numerous times and Las Cruces is honestly probably where I want to move after college.​

Nice !