Pulling data off an old beige Power Mac G3 tower?

sparkie7 said:

I have quite a bit of data on Jaz drives, Zip drives and hard drives (via SCSI) which I want to hook up to my Power Mac G3. I don't want to burn the data onto CD's as this will be very slow and time consuming.

Can I connect my iMac 27" to the G3 via ethernet, and copy data across this way? I assume I just need to turn "File sharing" 'on' on the G3 and the drives should be visible on my iMac 27? which I just drag-copy across?

Any other methods that might be quicker/better I haven't thought about?

I would ideally like to plug my Firewire 400 or 800 drives into the G3 but I don't think this is feasible?

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As far as I can tell there is only one powerMac G3 with firewire, if you have this one it is much faster than copying it over the network, network is only 10/100.

Another way is, if it has Firewire, start up the G3 in Target Disk Mode and connect it with the firewire Cable, the G3 HD disk will mount on your iMac.

sparkie7 said:

I just checked its behind and it dont have the firewire :-( but looks like I installed a USB card years ago. its got two USB ports so guess its USB1? I could plug my newer 1TB Western Digital external drives into this USB and copy the data off? I assume my 1TB WD externals have USB2 which are backward compatible with USB1 devices?

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Yes, USB is backwards compatible.

If it is a newer card it should be USB 2.

Beige G3 =

• NO firewire / TDM
• 10BaseT Ethernet = ~1 MB second
• Mac OS 8/9 = NO USB 2 support (read 1 MB / sec data transfer MAX to external)
• Mac OS 8/9 = Limited USB storage support (no way it will read a 1 TB volume properly)
• First Generation IDE drives (should be your boot drive) = 16 MB second MAX (if that)
• Old narrow SCSI devices = 5 MB second MAX (if that)

I would say your best bet would be to enable Apple Share (AFP) and share the hard drive/jazz drive out over network (where your iMac can browse to it) even though its going to be sloooww over the 10BaseE. Maybe if you can find a PCI 3Com 10/100 card some place as you may be able to get closer to the 10 MByte/second that can provide. (Mac OS 8/9 drivers still floating around the internet)

Install ATA drive in PM, copy data to it, get a external ATA/USB enclose, wham bam thank you ma'am - done.

Going back to the OP's question, yes, connecting your Beige G3 to your network and sharing with your iMac 27" would be the fastest/easiest.

You haven't said what OS you are running on your iMac. Appletalk and easy networking with classic Mac OS's has been getting cut out of newer system releases. I remember it being fairly easy with Tiger and Leopard, but I don't think I have connected any of my old beige boxes to my Snow Leopard Mac's.

If you are running OS 8 or 9 on your Beige G3, USB support is, shall we say, interesting? If you have OS X 10.2 on it, you may actually have USB 2 support, but installing OS X on it (if you don't have it on already) would also be "interesting."

Probably the short term, easiest solution is, as the last poster pointed out, to just hook up another IDE or PATA drive in the Beige G3, copy the files over, and then hook it up to your iMac. In fact, you could probably skip over the copying step by just removing the internal drive from your Beige G3, and hooking it up to the iMac via a drive dock.

I suggest using your external hard drive. As long as you have Mac OS 9.1 installed, you should be able to address up to 2TB of space without a problem. Even over USB 1.1. But it will take a while for the drive to show up on the desktop as OS 9 needs to look it over first. Your G3 has second generation EIDE drives that use the ATA-2 standard. It also has wide SCSI that goes at a maximum speed of 15 megabytes per second. Depending on which drive type has the data on it you wish to recover, an external hard drive might be the easiest. Finding a SCSI to USB adapter may prove expensive. If you are planning to transfer your data via a network, your 27" iMac is too new. You need a machine running 10.5/Leopard or older. Leopard is the last version of Mac OS X that can connect to a Classic Mac's shared drive. Apple dropped Classic Mac's implementation of Apple Talk with Snow Leopard.

I don't recall you saying what OS you had on your iMac.

Realize that upgrading the OS to your beige G3 may not solve all your problems, and if you don't already have the OS (i.e., have to go download it someplace and burn it to CD), then you are creating more work for yourself than if you could simply hook it up via ethernet.

Apple has a page with some info that might be helpful.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2453

UPDATE: a post here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3058454?start=0&tstart=0

says 10.6 cannot talk to OS 8 machines.

So it sounds like if your USB card works, using the external hard drive or a thumb drive is your best bet. Now it's a matter of figuring out what driver you need to get the USB card to see the external drive. Have you tried a thumb drive to see if it is recognized?

There are *plenty* of pages on the internetz, here is another one you may find helpful:

System7Today Tutorial

In general, you will have to know the specific system on each end, so you can google that specifically, if you run into trouble.

You will also need to know if you are hooking the G3 into a router, or directly, and if directly, if you have the appropriate cable (I think any Cat5e cable or above would work).

Good luck! (he says as he is disk-imaging his Pismo OS 9 disk to his "new" iBook G4 via Firewire Target Disk Mode...)

sparkie7 said:

Ok, I finally was able to update the System to 8.6 via update.

Stuck my USB external drives and also tried USB sticks and both came up with...

"The software needed to use the USB device cannot be found. Please refer to the device documentation to install the necessary software."

So not sure what to try next.....

Update to another Sys OS, like OS 9?

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how about cheetah or puma with a decent graphics card that thing should run it

Lil Chillbil said:

how about cheetah or puma with a decent graphics card that thing should run it

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One would want to run Jaguar/10.2. 10.0 and 10.1 are just too different and rather unusable.

Intell said:

One would want to run Jaguar/10.2. 10.0 and 10.1 are just too different and rather unusable.

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either one would work is my point