Bringing some PowerBook G3s back to life with DOMs

[coolchilli]

Hi everyone,

I started using a PowerBook G3 (Wallstreet II) about 2 years ago to use a a mule to transfer data between a PowerBook Duo and my home network. Slowly but surely I fell in love with MacOS 9.2 (again) and began building a small collection of classic software.

Alas! At this point the little IBM Travelstar spun for the final time after 25 years (non continuous) service, and no amount of data recovery can resurrect it.

I decided this was the moment to upgrade to a DOM, and have bought a 16Gb module which, with a 44-pin IDE male to male gender changer fits nicely in the drive bay.

However!

I couldn't boot to CD from my MacOS 8 install CD, and so went on a hunt on eBay to find an alternative.

I managed to buy a Pismo install CD, but the PowerBook again wouldn't boot.

I kept buying on eBay hoping to use trial-and-error to narrow down my problem...

... skip forward about a year, and I'm now the proud owner of 4x WallStreet II PowerBooks. Only one of them boots to my Pismo install CD, and coincidentally, that's the one with a working HDD. Two of them have no HDD, and the other (my first) has a new DOM.

I *think* what is going on is that any of the PowerBooks will boot if there is no HDD, or if there is a working HDD, but if the dead HDD is fitted (or indeed, my DOM) then they will not boot to CD.

I'm guessing at this point that the issue lies with the DOM, so my question is- have other users been successful with DOM upgrades, and if so- is there something I should bear in mind with this approach to get mine to work?

Is there good software beyond MacOS Monterey Disk Utility for imaging the working Travelstar, and cloning it to the DOM? Indeed, I was kind of hoping this would be a quick solution, but as I can't boot to CD either with a blank DOM or one with image (and of course, neither can I boot to the DOM) - I'm drawing blanks.

I guess a fallback would be to buy an IDE SSD or even a HDD - but I had read somewhere that DOMs offered much better compatibility and were generally more reliable than CF options also.

But at this point, I'm reaching the end of my tether... I'm open for feedback and advice from the community!

Thanks in advance - grateful to this (and the very many other forums) for helping me get this far already...

 

[weckart]

DOMs are fairly pricey for what they are so don't really figure much in vintage computing. They featured more in glorified dumb terminals, which wouldn't expect to be writing a lot of data to disk, hence if your DOM isn't industrial strength, then it probably isn't much better than using CF or SDHC. The preferred route is mSATA to IDE adapter for all vintage Macs with IDE drives. That or just get another laptop IDE drive. They last for years and there are plenty on eBay. I don't subscribe to the received wisdom that they are all about to fail. With the slow bus on Wallstreets and earlier, you won't get a huge speed bump from solid state drives either.

As for the CD, you can boot from PCMCIA on a Wallstreet as long as you stick to OS9. It doesn't do so well with OSX. I used a CF card with MacOS 8 and 9 via PCMCIA to install on some of my vintage Apple notebooks.

 

[FirDerrig33]

Hi everyone,

I started using a PowerBook G3 (Wallstreet II) about 2 years ago to use a a mule to transfer data between a PowerBook Duo and my home network. Slowly but surely I fell in love with MacOS 9.2 (again) and began building a small collection of classic software.

Alas! At this point the little IBM Travelstar spun for the final time after 25 years (non continuous) service, and no amount of data recovery can resurrect it.

I decided this was the moment to upgrade to a DOM, and have bought a 16Gb module which, with a 44-pin IDE male to male gender changer fits nicely in the drive bay.

However!

I couldn't boot to CD from my MacOS 8 install CD, and so went on a hunt on eBay to find an alternative.

I managed to buy a Pismo install CD, but the PowerBook again wouldn't boot.

I kept buying on eBay hoping to use trial-and-error to narrow down my problem...

... skip forward about a year, and I'm now the proud owner of 4x WallStreet II PowerBooks. Only one of them boots to my Pismo install CD, and coincidentally, that's the one with a working HDD. Two of them have no HDD, and the other (my first) has a new DOM.

I *think* what is going on is that any of the PowerBooks will boot if there is no HDD, or if there is a working HDD, but if the dead HDD is fitted (or indeed, my DOM) then they will not boot to CD.

I'm guessing at this point that the issue lies with the DOM, so my question is- have other users been successful with DOM upgrades, and if so- is there something I should bear in mind with this approach to get mine to work?

Is there good software beyond MacOS Monterey Disk Utility for imaging the working Travelstar, and cloning it to the DOM? Indeed, I was kind of hoping this would be a quick solution, but as I can't boot to CD either with a blank DOM or one with image (and of course, neither can I boot to the DOM) - I'm drawing blanks.

I guess a fallback would be to buy an IDE SSD or even a HDD - but I had read somewhere that DOMs offered much better compatibility and were generally more reliable than CF options also.

But at this point, I'm reaching the end of my tether... I'm open for feedback and advice from the community!

Thanks in advance - grateful to this (and the very many other forums) for helping me get this far already...

This might be a silly question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Are you pressing "C" when attempting to boot from the optical drive? If so then....what about using the netbook feature? as long as you have an installable image locally stored, you should be able to boot from that if the optical drive is not loading properly. that could be one way to get it done as long as you have the images.

 

[FirDerrig33]

The last time I had one of those machines was a long time ago; maybe a decade. I sent it to another member and set it up so that when it opened, it used the text to voice command to read a welcome message from the laptop. It was fun!

 

[coolchilli]

This might be a silly question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Are you pressing "C" when attempting to boot from the optical drive? If so then....what about using the netbook feature? as long as you have an installable image locally stored, you should be able to boot from that if the optical drive is not loading properly. that could be one way to get it done as long as you have the images.

Yes - I'm using "C" when booting!

DOMs are fairly pricey for what they are so don't really figure much in vintage computing. They featured more in glorified dumb terminals, which wouldn't expect to be writing a lot of data to disk, hence if your DOM isn't industrial strength, then it probably isn't much better than using CF or SDHC. The preferred route is mSATA to IDE adapter for all vintage Macs with IDE drives. That or just get another laptop IDE drive. They last for years and there are plenty on eBay. I don't subscribe to the received wisdom that they are all about to fail. With the slow bus on Wallstreets and earlier, you won't get a huge speed bump from solid state drives either.

As for the CD, you can boot from PCMCIA on a Wallstreet as long as you stick to OS9. It doesn't do so well with OSX. I used a CF card with MacOS 8 and 9 via PCMCIA to install on some of my vintage Apple notebooks.

grateful to you both FirDerrig and weckart for responding so quickly!

It seems that the booting to CD fails if the hard drive is faulty or not recognised (? symbol in disk icon). Would this be the case also with PCMCIA booting?

I have a CF to IDE adapter arriving next week, so will try that compared to the DOM and see if I get further with it?

Thanks!

 

[weckart]

Yes - I'm using "C" when booting!

grateful to you both FirDerrig and weckart for responding so quickly!

It seems that the booting to CD fails if the hard drive is faulty or not recognised (? symbol in disk icon). Would this be the case also with PCMCIA booting?

I have a CF to IDE adapter arriving next week, so will try that compared to the DOM and see if I get further with it?

Thanks!

Cmd+Opt+Shift+Del to boot from other than hard disk is what I use on Old World computers (i.e. pre-Pismo).

Here's a link to the user manual. You should find useful info inside.

 

[haramia]

What kind of DOM have you bought? Although I don't have this machine, I have an old thin client running Windows 98, and I used a Hyperdisk IDE DOM in it. I'm very satisfied with its quality and it can be easily sourced from Aliexpress, perhaps it would work well in your PowerBook too.

 

[micahgartman]

IIRC the Wallstreet isn't able to boot from anything other than a HDD. There was a thread about it a couple of years ago. It's that ridiculous hard drive connector thing—it blocks access to the jumpers on the IDE/ATA adapter.

If you need a bootable CD, PM and I can get you situated

 

[FirDerrig33]

IIRC the Wallstreet isn't able to boot from anything other than a HDD. There was a thread about it a couple of years ago. It's that ridiculous hard drive connector thing—it blocks access to the jumpers on the IDE/ATA adapter.

If you need a bootable CD, PM and I can get you situated

Really??? Well that's not awesome given how much Steve Jobs was pushing for basically a cloud type service even back in the PPC days and why he would boot his computer over the network because it was faster than the internal drive. :-(

I am huge fan of alternative booting methods and if none of them work so if that's the case then I am definitely not going to be any more help with this topic.

 

[micahgartman]

Really??? Well that's not awesome given how much Steve Jobs was pushing for basically a cloud type service even back in the PPC days and why he would boot his computer over the network because it was faster than the internal drive. :-(

I am huge fan of alternative booting methods and if none of them work so if that's the case then I am definitely not going to be any more help with this topic.

It could be worse—imagine booting from an external SCSI drive. Quantum Fireball FTW!!!

 

[FirDerrig33]

It could be worse—imagine booting from an external SCSI drive. Quantum Fireball FTW!!!

Fair enough and good point!

 

[Amethyst1]

It could be worse—imagine booting from an external SCSI drive.

There are multiple SCSI drive emulators. Now that would be fun to boot from.