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My first PPC Mac...
- Thread starter DCBassman
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mSATA, don't have the spinner with me (away from home for a few weeks).
However, I cannot get a decent DVD burnt, no matter what I do, so no progress at the moment.
However, I cannot get a decent DVD burnt, no matter what I do, so no progress at the moment.
Congrats ! 
However I'm not sure I understand, what gave you the chime was installing the new IDE/mSATA interface, or something else ? And is the spinning drive installed now, or is it the SSD ?
EDIT : I clearly missed the above recent posts lol. So it's the SSD, which is a better solution than a spinning hard drive (essentially because of no moving parts, not faster transfers which are limited by the IDE i/f anyway).Still unclear though as to which IDE/mSATA i/f you're now using, the initial one or the 2nd one you ordered same model as mine ?
Btw I also initially thought booting/installing from USB would never work on my Alubook, until I tried a *sixth* pendrive (all the others failed miserably), of course I thought it was just a waste of time, except that... it did work, finally ! Haven't found any rational explanation for this phenomenon, but clearly it's quite known issue with old Macs, a hit or miss situation. Wondering if you're in the same case, could be worth trying a bunch of different usb thumbdrives and see what happens...
However I'm not sure I understand, what gave you the chime was installing the new IDE/mSATA interface, or something else ? And is the spinning drive installed now, or is it the SSD ?
EDIT : I clearly missed the above recent posts lol. So it's the SSD, which is a better solution than a spinning hard drive (essentially because of no moving parts, not faster transfers which are limited by the IDE i/f anyway).Still unclear though as to which IDE/mSATA i/f you're now using, the initial one or the 2nd one you ordered same model as mine ?
what do you mean by "decent DVD burnt" ? Has Tiger completed the install, or...?
Btw I also initially thought booting/installing from USB would never work on my Alubook, until I tried a *sixth* pendrive (all the others failed miserably), of course I thought it was just a waste of time, except that... it did work, finally ! Haven't found any rational explanation for this phenomenon, but clearly it's quite known issue with old Macs, a hit or miss situation. Wondering if you're in the same case, could be worth trying a bunch of different usb thumbdrives and see what happens...
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Using original interface and mSATA SSD. The other has arrived, it's not quite identical to look at, but probably is electrically.Congrats !
However I'm not sure I understand, what gave you the chime was installing the new IDE/mSATA interface, or something else ? And is the spinning drive installed now, or is it the SSD ?
EDIT : I clearly missed the above recent posts lol. So it's the SSD, which is a better solution than a spinning hard drive (essentially because of no moving parts, not faster transfers which are limited by the IDE i/f anyway).Still unclear though as to which IDE/mSATA i/f you're now using, the initial one or the 2nd one you ordered same model as mine ?
what do you mean by "decent DVD burnt" ? Has Tiger completed the install, or...?
Btw I also initially thought booting/installing from USB would never work on my Alubook, until I tried a *sixth* pendrive (all the others failed miserably), of course I thought it was just a waste of time, except that... it did work, finally ! Haven't found any rational explanation for this phenomenon, but clearly it's quite known issue with old Macs, a hit or miss situation. Wondering if you're in the same case, could be worth trying a bunch of different usb thumbdrives and see what happens...
I may in desperation go through my stash of flash drives. Best succes generally has been with Sandisk Flair 32GB drives. I'll give one a go right now!
Alright, well good luck with that, FYI mine is a 8GB flash drive at least 10 years old, can't tell from which manufacturer, it was given to me a long time ago and there's nothing printed on it apart from capacity.
Hmm... I seem to remember I once ran a utility that can tell as much as one needs to know on a solid state "hard drive", will look for it and see if I can extract detailed info on that "special" usb pendrive.
EDIT : found it, the utility is called "UsbTreeView", just ran it on my PC and boy does it give you enough info on all the hardware on your machine in a split second !
Just in case you'd be interested I've attached the app zipfile below (only works on Windows), and as for the thumbdrive that did boot on my Alubook here's some info extracted from the usbtreeview app :
Never heard of that maker lol, probably info of no use to you unfortunately.
Hmm... I seem to remember I once ran a utility that can tell as much as one needs to know on a solid state "hard drive", will look for it and see if I can extract detailed info on that "special" usb pendrive.
EDIT : found it, the utility is called "UsbTreeView", just ran it on my PC and boy does it give you enough info on all the hardware on your machine in a split second !
Just in case you'd be interested I've attached the app zipfile below (only works on Windows), and as for the thumbdrive that did boot on my Alubook here's some info extracted from the usbtreeview app :
Never heard of that maker lol, probably info of no use to you unfortunately.
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Excellent, thank you. The Flair was a no-go, will try an older 8GB Toshiba later.Alright, well good luck with that, FYI mine is a 8GB flash drive at least 10 years old, can't tell from which manufacturer, it was given to me a long time ago and there's nothing printed on it apart from capacity.
Hmm... I seem to remember I once ran a utility that can tell as much as one needs to know on a solid state "hard drive", will look for it and see if I can extract detailed info on that "special" usb pendrive.
EDIT : found it, the utility is called "UsbTreeView", just ran it on my PC and boy does it give you enough info on all the hardware on your machine in a split second !
Just in case you'd be interested I've attached the app zipfile below (only works on Windows), and as for the thumbdrive that did boot on my Alubook here's some info extracted from the usbtreeview app :
Never heard of that maker lol, probably info of no use to you unfortunately.
Which version of Tiger are you trying to install (a retail version or recovery disc)?
Nope, nothing.
Whatever I can get hold of. It's a great deal more fragmented in terms of getting the right version. Just trying another download from Macintosh Garden, and so far, so good.
The biggest problem is obe I've rarely faced before - bad ISOs. They burn and don't verify, ot they complete successfully but despite apparent correct titles, won't even show up in OF. This problem is not limited to OS X ISOs, but to other PPC software too.
Edit: another failure.
Edit: another failure.
i suppose you know how to boot into Open Firmware, how to list the various h/w elements in your machine, and what to look for in terms of usb port and drive (e.g.
/pci@f2000000/usb@1b/disk@1) ? Just trying to understand where you're at, maybe you're missing some detail, in my case IIRC even the pendrives that refused to boot were at least visible in O.F...As for Tiger, FWIW the one that I could successfully install on my 12" Alubook is the Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Retail DVD d/l from the archive.org web site. I burnt a DVD+RW with that iso in OS X (hackintosh'ed Big Sur in a VM on a Win10 laptop) simply using the integrated
Burn functionality via a right-click on the ISO file, anything I tried outside of a Mac OS based PC would not boot, let alone install.
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The one definite limitation is the the PB optical drive is shot, so having to use external Firewire drive. It would be good to see if I could at least determine what's going on. Will do more research into OF, think I'm going to need it!
What is the furthest you've gotten? Your problems remind me of the issues I had with the first SATA to IDE adapter I tried in my PB. The installation of OS X would proceed like normal before either failing (as if the DVD image was corrupt), or finished successfully but result in a system that was not bootable. For some reason the adapter worked fine with a newly formated SSD but writing to the drive severely impacted the performance. I tested the drive in other machine and it worked flawlessly, it was just the adapter the caused the problem. Switching to the red adapter I linked to above solved all of my issues.
Toast was a burning software that could also write disk images. It was a common standard for early OS X and Classic Mac OS. Often times the images with a .toast extension will work fine in macOS if you change the extension to .iso.
@DCBassman, re: Open Firmware, there's a good tutorial video here, done by C. Cullen the developer of Fienix (Linux based OS).
For booting an OS X type, follow this tutorial (the pendrive must be inserted *before* powering up), and once you've identified the right
To give you an idea, the boot command in O.F. could look either like this :
P.S. important : to "burn" a flash drive with a bootable ISO, use "dd" as explained here. (doesn't matter that it's a Linux distro i/o OS X Tiger, same procedure and commands, just make sure you do the dd thing from within an OS X machine, I think it's mandatory, though not 100% sure).
For booting an OS X type, follow this tutorial (the pendrive must be inserted *before* powering up), and once you've identified the right
devalias for the usb slot where you have plugged the pendrive (same procedure no matter what type of OS has been written to it), or the full path if there's no alias for it, you'll just have to replace "yaboot" with ":tbxi" and see if it works.To give you an idea, the boot command in O.F. could look either like this :
boot ud:,\\:tbxi if "ud" is the devalias for the usb slot (or any similar name like "ud1"), or like that : boot /pci@f2000000/usb@1b/disk@1:,\\:tbxi if no alias is preset for that usb slot.P.S. important : to "burn" a flash drive with a bootable ISO, use "dd" as explained here. (doesn't matter that it's a Linux distro i/o OS X Tiger, same procedure and commands, just make sure you do the dd thing from within an OS X machine, I think it's mandatory, though not 100% sure).
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Ok, next job is to install the new interface.
Thanks, lots to learn!
you don't say ! ^^ had to go thru learning curve as well a few months ago, doing a little better now (having to enter cryptic O.F. commands from a FR keyboard i/o US forces you to concentrate/focus, trust me !) but still so much to learn - but that's Ok.
Btw I found out that on my A1010 Alubook whenever a pendrive contains bootable stuff which pleases it (and well formatted and burnt/dd'ed) a new icon appears in the boot picker (where you get pressing the ALT (Option) key at reboot) so I can select the usb drive from the boot picker GUI rather than having to enter O.F. and type bizarre commands.
IOW, you could first try the boot picker and see if the usb drive is offered to boot from, before attempting the O.F. thing as shown in the video clip. And if that doesn't work, there's still a chance just reboot into O.F. and see how it goes.
All this, provided you can find a usb stick that your machine is willing to work with...
Ok, still no progress, but also not had much time. Thinking I need to replace the SuperDrive to remove external elements from the setup. Also unsure about the Firewire drive - think it may be faulty.
Wow, you're not being lucky with your A1107 laptop, are you ? 🥹
One thing I've learnt is that not all Tiger ISO's work with all Pbook models, ideally you'd need to find the original CD/DVD set included with the laptop (I've seen some sold on the bay), or an ISO of the same version of OS X targeted at that specific 17" model. So before replacing more h/w items (you've done quite a lot already !) I'd first check on that if not done yet.
Given that you seem to very much doubt the quality of the DVDs you've burnt, have you had the time yet to look into the Open firmware stuff and booting from usb ? (anyhow, hopefully all of these problems aren't the symptoms of something else "broken" in that laptop...)
One thing I've learnt is that not all Tiger ISO's work with all Pbook models, ideally you'd need to find the original CD/DVD set included with the laptop (I've seen some sold on the bay), or an ISO of the same version of OS X targeted at that specific 17" model. So before replacing more h/w items (you've done quite a lot already !) I'd first check on that if not done yet.
Given that you seem to very much doubt the quality of the DVDs you've burnt, have you had the time yet to look into the Open firmware stuff and booting from usb ? (anyhow, hopefully all of these problems aren't the symptoms of something else "broken" in that laptop...)
Yup, no more h/w until more thought has gone in, although the completist in me is already eyeing up a pair of new DL SuperDrives, one for each 17"!
Have done some OF work, but nothing becomes visible. More thumb drives incoming. Will also try with the original spinner, but unsure if its mechanical state.