Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

My first PPC Mac...

DCBassman

DCBassman

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Oct 28, 2021
1,081
837
West Devon, UK
...has arrived courtesy of @Amethyst1 , and a nice bit of kit it is too, although the HDD doesn't seem to have appreciated the journey from Germany to the UK...
It's a A1107 Powerbook G4.
RAM is already maxed, so it's all about the storage in terms of upgrades, and then making sure I can bypass any throttling, as the chances of getting a battery for it are pretty much zero. I might try and get hold of a dead battery and rebuild it, but getting it going is first priority.
To that end, a Chenyang SA-106 CV mSATA to IDE case and a Kingston 256GB mSATA SSD are incoming.
Also needing the bigger 65W PSU for no-battery operation.
I hope to use MintPPC as the OS, as Mint is an OS I already know fairly well.
 
  • Like
Reactions: rampancy, doctor_dog, tevion5 and 7 others
DCBassman said:
...has arrived courtesy of @Amethyst1 , and a nice bit of kit it is too, although the HDD doesn't seem to have appreciated the journey from Germany to the UK...
It's a A1107 Powerbook G4.
Click to expand...
Good for you, DCBassman!
I think i owned the same model, fresh form the box!
that notebook changed my life and made me a more of a computer person
as i took my work with me instead of behind an Imac G3 in an apartment.

i use snow leopard 10.6.8 occasionally on a macbook air 2010 even today
as some software still has an impact on my daily computing tasks.
i think that powerbook can run that OSX but I forgot since that is PPC.
Leopard was a great osx since that had features that sped up most tasks.
but you might know more than me on this....

enjoy your powerbook, i know i did back then!
 
  • Like
Reactions: eyoungren and DCBassman
DCBassman said:
I hope to use MintPPC as the OS, as Mint is an OS I already know fairly well.
Click to expand...
I also wanted to try MintPPC on my A1010 Alubook few months ago (I daily use Mint in a VM on a Win11 PC), however last time I checked the distro was down.

In fact the developer web site still says "Installation of MintPPC32 and MintPPC64 will FAIL." at the top of the page... but I'd be interested to see if you have any success with this. :)
 
  • Like
Reactions: DCBassman
Alubook133 said:
I also wanted to try MintPPC on my A1010 Alubook few months ago (I daily use Mint in a VM on a Win11 PC), however last time I checked the distro was down.

In fact the developer web site still says "Installation of MintPPC32 and MintPPC64 will FAIL." at the top of the page... but I'd be interested to see if you have any success with this. :)
Click to expand...
Just putting it back together with an mSATA-to-IDE device carrying a Kingston 256GB device. But as yet don't fully understand the boot selection process.
 
Alubook133 said:
I also wanted to try MintPPC on my A1010 Alubook few months ago (I daily use Mint in a VM on a Win11 PC), however last time I checked the distro was down.

In fact the developer web site still says "Installation of MintPPC32 and MintPPC64 will FAIL." at the top of the page... but I'd be interested to see if you have any success with this. :)
Click to expand...
Few years ago I also tried to install it to my iBook G4 and it failed in GRUB -installation phase, if I remember correctly. This was the common problem back then and I followed the situation for about a year but it didn't get fixed so I lost hope and interest. DCB, please let us know what is the current situation. 👍

DCBassman said:
It's a A1107 Powerbook G4.
Click to expand...
It would always be nice to say in clear english what it is so we don't have to google it. Not all of us are so weird that we would remember all of the Axxxx -codes out of our memory. ;) In fact, I have 15+ Mac laptops and I think I cannot remember a single code at this moment. Thanks!
 
  • Like
Reactions: Jumpthesnark, headlessmike and DCBassman
ToniCH said:
It would always be nice to say in clear english what it is so we don't have to google it. Not all of us are so weird that we would remember all of the Axxxx -codes out of our memory. ;) In fact, I have 15+ Mac laptops and I think I cannot remember a single code at this moment. Thanks!
Click to expand...
Yup, can be exceptionally geeky sometimes!
A1107 Powerbook G4 17" 1.67GHz Aluminium.
Have been doing some parts hunting and have found a possible source for charger and battery that won't quite bankrupt me!
 
  • Like
  • Haha
Reactions: headlessmike, Certificate of Excellence and ToniCH
DCBassman said:
Just putting it back together with an mSATA-to-IDE device carrying a Kingston 256GB device.
Click to expand...
exactly what I did on my Alubook (cf my signature), also a 256GB Kingston SSD, been working great since install last summer.

But as yet don't fully understand the boot selection process.
Click to expand...
not sure what you're referring to, anyway there are other people around here way more knowledgeable than I am on these topics, hopefully someone else will chime in and help.
But as I said (and maybe you didn't notice), but MintPPC is now down due to dismantled repos (Debian PPC I believe) or something like this...
 
  • Like
Reactions: DCBassman
Alright, looking forward to reading from your PPC adventures then. ;)

the chances of getting a battery for it are pretty much zero. I might try and get hold of a dead battery and rebuild it
Click to expand...
btw I use Arch Lin... oops, btw I also have the battery issue, I've seen several offerings (mostly 2nd hand) for 15" and 17" Powerbook's, however no luck for my 12" Alubook it's very rare, the only one I've found is for sale at like 500$ lol.

I've watched a couple of tutorials on how to rebuild a dead battery, the main issues are soldering/melding and the microchip that manages charge/discharge cycles (plus opening the existing battery is no joke either), not to mention the non-zero probability of the whole thing blowing out either while your building it or afterwards once installed back in the laptop (battery gets too hot, and then...).
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: DCBassman and MBAir2010
the fact that no one makes a good working web browser for G4 Macs is what made me junk all my G4 and G5 Macs.

unless you wanna run one always off the 8internet.
 
  • Like
Reactions: DCBassman
Darren.h said:
the fact that no one makes a good working web browser for G4 Macs is what made me junk all my G4 and G5 Macs.

unless you wanna run one always off the 8internet.
Click to expand...
Aquafox (link) is a good browser that is still being maintained for Tiger or newer. But the modern internet is getting too heavy for G4's unfortunately.

I mainly use my Powerbook G4 for gaming. My wife and I have a small collection of late 90s and early 2000s games that run great on my 1.25 GHz 15" G4 running Jaguar (with or without Classic mode). We used to use a blue and white G3 tower for this but it is in storage now as we ran out of space in our apartment after having kids.
 
As these things don't appear to boot from USB (I know *some* of them do, but this one doesn't want to...), I have incoming a LaCie firewire DVD DL burner, as I believe the machine will be able to see this in the OF bootpicker. Once it has arrived, I'll get burnin'!
 
20250207_200704.jpg

It lives!
Sort of...
Unfortunately, the hard drive isn't visible to the OS, so something out of whack somewhere. As I'm away from home for some weeks, on the end of a 5mb/s connection, there's little more I can do for the moment. I'm happy that it seems to work!
Once on the end of a decent Internet connection, I can download some different software and try again.
 
  • Like
Reactions: MBAir2010, Certificate of Excellence and headlessmike
Have ordered a new 160GB spinner for it. Hopefully this will work, and tells me three things:
1) The IDE-mSATA interface and/or the SSD I used doesn't work in this Mac.
2) Confirms the orginal HDD as DOA.
3) If this one doesn't work, then the interface is somehow at fault.
In the meantime, I will go and read a book while the very slow broadband here downloads a Leopard PPC iso to play with.
 
  • Like
Reactions: jojo2k and MBAir2010
DCBassman said:
Have ordered a new 160GB spinner for it. Hopefully this will work, and tells me three things:
1) The IDE-mSATA interface and/or the SSD I used doesn't work in this Mac.
2) Confirms the orginal HDD as DOA.
3) If this one doesn't work, then the interface is somehow at fault.
In the meantime, I will go and read a book while the very slow broadband here downloads a Leopard PPC iso to play with.
Click to expand...
PPC Macs can be very picky when it comes to compatibility with components like SSD adapters. The first one I tried on my G4 didn't work either even though it worked fine with newer hardware.
 
  • Like
Reactions: DCBassman
DCBassman said:
Unfortunately, the hard drive isn't visible to the OS, so something out of whack somewhere.
Click to expand...

that's too bad... :confused:

Just for reference, like I said above I've done the same kind of upgrade on my Powerbook 12" (A1010) and it works fine, with the following h/w :

Kingston 256G SSD (mSATA, I believe you bought the same model), and mSATA to IDE converter card/box (same model as on Amazon, but I'm not exactly fan of Bezos so I try to avoid buying from them as much as I can).
 
  • Like
Reactions: DCBassman
Alubook133 said:
that's too bad... :confused:

Just for reference, like I said above I've done the same kind of upgrade on my Powerbook 12" (A1010) and it works fine, with the following h/w :

Kingston 256G SSD (mSATA, I believe you bought the same model), and mSATA to IDE converter card/box (same model as on Amazon, but I'm not exactly fan of Bezos so I try to avoid buying from them as much as I can).
Click to expand...
Looks like the same adapter, but probably isn't. I'll get one like yours ordered.
Edit: done, with similar caveats!
 
Last edited:
One thing I've rediscovered is the pain of burning DVDs etc. Using a 2011 MacBook Pro didn't work well. Using the same machine with the Firewire external Superdrive was better, but it seems I only get reliable burning using the 2007 17" MBP running MX Linux and using XFBurn. Not a pretty program, but it gets the job done.
 
DCBassman said:
And there might be the problem - jumper settings! Is this a thing in these machines? This might be all that's rendering the drive invisible if it is...
Click to expand...
The jumper would be on the drive itself. For IDE drives there are three modes: master, slave, and cable select. Cable select is probably what your machine uses as it’s one of the last PPC Macs. On an older Mac you would use Master for the hard drive.

DCBassman said:
One thing I've rediscovered is the pain of burning DVDs etc. Using a 2011 MacBook Pro didn't work well. Using the same machine with the Firewire external Superdrive was better, but it seems I only get reliable burning using the 2007 17" MBP running MX Linux and using XFBurn. Not a pretty program, but it gets the job done.
Click to expand...
I bought a generic USB burner that I use with my M1 mini to burn discs for my old machines. It works fine with my PowerBook too, though the internal SuperDrive still works well.
 
  • Like
Reactions: DCBassman
After as much checking as I could manage, I ascertained that the incoming IDE/mSATA interface is pretty much identical to what I already have. So, while yet another very slow download and burn was underway, I stripped out the drive, checked it all over, then rebuilt, leaving the screws out for the moment. Plugged it in.
Chime!
It hadn't done that before, so I was hopeful I'd put something right, and it seems I'm correct!
Installing Tiger as I type.
 
  • Like
Reactions: jojo2k
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back