Post Your "About This Mac" Screenshots (PowerPC)!

[LightBulbFun]

That must have been all of ten seconds. Did you have an alert notification?

Turns out what I thought was my Performa hidden under a ton of stuff was actually an Ultrasparc 5. This antique was skulking behind my Sawtooth and I only needed to haul out a few desktops to get to it. I have a fresh 80GB drive to play with. The original 4GB Quantum Fireball is too noisy and MacOS has started to freeze on me as if the CPU is pegged 100% on it.

Not sure if the 96MB of RAM would be better updated to 128MB first. What does slightly concern me is that although I could partition and format the 80GB drive booting up with the Performa's Restore CD (7.5.5), it then complained that there was no hard drive to restore to. Hoping that there aren't any other hardware gremlins on it.

alert notifications indeed (took me a while to write up a response as I just finished giving some tech support to someone LOL)

96MB should work, but the more ram the merrier (you just need 96MB to boot OS X, more ram will speed things up of course but thats it), Just a heads up you need Mac OS 9+ to use xpostfacto. also a couple things to remember, all OWR ATA macs have the 8GB bug in OS X and that the 6360-6500s SCSI bus can be a bit pokey when it comes to OS X (in 10.0-10.2.8 at least) if you are going to do what I want you to do then I recommend making a 7.5GB partition on the drive for OS X and then the rest for Mac OS 9.x, then I recommend setting everything up (installing 9.x etc) then pulling the drive out and imaging an OS X install of your choice to the 7.5GB partition (with my patched kernel of course if your trying to do 10.4.11 ) then booting into 9.x and using xpostfacto to boot the OS X install (if you are doing tiger make sure to install my patched kernel on the OS X install before imaging it to the 7.5GB partition)

10.0-10.2.8 might be installable using the CD-ROM if the SCSI bus does not throw a wobbly, but Tiger has to be installed via pulling and imaging the drive, (well I Have an idea on how it could be done using a tiger install CD but its quite complicated and I have not been able to test it)

using the web archive to browse the xpostfacto forums is a good way to get a lot of info on shoving OS X onto these old beige beasts

 

[weckart]

Already ahead of you. Just installing Tiger onto a 7.5GB partition using my MDD. I think I have found your kernel. What was the test for seeing that it was installed properly again?

 

[LightBulbFun]

Already ahead of you. Just installing Tiger onto a 7.5GB partition using my MDD. I think I have found your kernel. What was the test for seeing that it was installed properly again?

Woo! run uname -a you should see a release date of 2015 (has it been 2 years already...)

 

[weckart]

Will report back later if successful, otherwise Friday as I have a long journey at the crack of dawn tomorrow. Will have to install 9.1 on the 6500 as the MDD will only run 9.2.2, which is too much for the 603e.

 

[LightBulbFun]

Will report back later if successful, otherwise Friday as I have a long journey at the crack of dawn tomorrow. Will have to install 9.1 on the 6500 as the MDD will only run 9.2.2, which is too much for the 603e.

thank you for attempting this a 2 year wait will hopefully be over soon...

with some hacking its possible to get 9.1 running on an MDD and 9.2.2 running on the 6500 (Using OS 9 helper for the 6500)

 

[weckart]

with some hacking its possible to get 9.1 running on an MDD and 9.2.2 running on the 6500 (Using OS 9 helper for the 6500)

Yes but just using XPostFacto is shaky enough a foundation to begin with without adding to the hoops to jump through. Finished Tiger and the kernel has taken. Just put the drive back into the Performa and waiting for 9.1 to finish installing. Let's just hope XPostFacto doesn't throw a wobbly with this unknown hardware.

 

[LightBulbFun]

Yes but just using XPostFacto is shaky enough a foundation to begin with without adding to the hoops to jump through. Finished Tiger and the kernel has taken. Just put the drive back into the Performa and waiting for 9.1 to finish installing. Let's just hope XPostFacto doesn't throw a wobbly with this unknown hardware.

from what I have personally played with on the 4400 and my PowerBook 3400c and from what i have seen on other peoples 604 machines Xpostfacto will give a warning that tiger wont work on a 603-604 but its just a warning, xpostfacto will still proceed to install all the needed kexts and patches and let you try and boot the system, it wont let you proceed if you dont less than 96MB of RAM however. CPU Tiger stuff aside, the 6500 is a "compatible" machine when working with xpostfacto so it should not throw a wobbly there... (famous last words LOL) ie if you where say installing 10.2.8 you should be able to feed it a Jag CD and off it would go and install etc

 

[weckart]

Well, it gave the warning triangle as I had expected and you did too. I nevertheless persevered and... nothing. The screen stayed black for a few seconds longer than normal before the telltale cursor in the corner told of a failure to boot OSX and falling back on the helper volume.

Too tired today to troubleshoot further, so will have to postpone till Friday.

From what I have read about Jaguar, XPF won't install from the SCSI CD. Instead, you need to restore the install CD onto a dedicated volume on the HDD so that Jaguar does not have to deal with the SCSI bus.

 

[LightBulbFun]

Well, it gave the warning triangle as I had expected and you did too. I nevertheless persevered and... nothing. The screen stayed black for a few seconds longer than normal before the telltale cursor in the corner told of a failure to boot OSX and falling back on the helper volume.

Too tired today to troubleshoot further, so will have to postpone till Friday.

interesting, do you have a picture of this? there should not be a helper volume at play here (thats for when your booting OS X install CDs or are booting from a Firewire volume, or if you explicitly set one up)

what are your settings in xpostfacto? even with the stock kernel id expect to see an Apple logo, with the stock kernel it will hang at the apple logo, but it sounds like its not even getting that far? the 7.5GB partition is within the first 8GB of the drive right? make sure to click on "install" in the menu bar then click on "everything" should install everything needed to boot OS X (assuming my kernel is in place )

 

[weckart]

interesting, do you have a picture of this? there should not be a helper volume at play here (thats for when your booting OS X install CDs or are booting from a Firewire volume, or if you explicitly set one up)

Eh? The helper volume is 9.1 and there is no way of booting OSX without it. There is no picture to post as OSX is just not booting at all.

 

[LightBulbFun]

Eh? The helper volume is 9.1 and there is no way of booting OSX without it. There is no picture to post as OSX is just not booting at all.

whats the "Helper" drop down menu set too? it should be set to "none"

otherwise if you set it to the 9.1 volume (assuming it even lets you) it will copy part of the OS X install to that and then try and boot from that partition which wont work as its outside the 8GB barrier.

when your not using a helper volume, xpostfacto simply installs all the needed files to the OS X partition of choice then setups the right NVRAM variables, and reboots the machine to where it should boot into OS X, a couple things that might help, go into options, set input-device as keyboard, and output device as whatever video/display card your using (if your using the built in card it should be ATI/ATY something) you can also turn auto-boot off if you want it to drop you at an Open firmware prompt where you can then type "boot" (no quotes) to boot OS X or "bye" to boot into the Mac OS ROM IIRC make sure to only turn auto-boot off once you have you input and output devices configured correctly
[doublepost=1507755828][/doublepost]Just discovered that when a Kanga has a floppy drive installed it causes OS X 10.2.8 (not tested Tiger with this bug yet) to stall quite early on in the boot processes round about the same place the 4400 hung trying to boot 10.2.8 as well... I wonder if disconnecting the 4400s floppy drive will allow it to boot into 10.2.8

a project to embark on tomorrow sadly even if it did work it still would not solve the problem of tiger on that machine as Xpostfacto 4,s BootX file is incompatible with the 4400 and as such Tiger even with my patched kernel does not make it into kernel land, but it will still be awesome if i can get 10.2.8 booting at least as currently it does not even boot 10.2.8

 

[weckart]

Tried all this, firstly without disabling autoboot, which I always forget to do. It left the Performa unbootable. It would stop and either freeze at the Happy Mac or go into a bootloop. OF tells me that the Tiger volume is unbootable. It is going to need more hacking.
One extra tidbit. The PRAM battery is dead for what it is worth.

 

[LightBulbFun]

Tried all this, firstly without disabling autoboot, which I always forget to do. It left the Performa unbootable. It would stop and either freeze at the Happy Mac or go into a bootloop. OF tells me that the Tiger volume is unbootable. It is going to need more hacking.
One extra tidbit. The PRAM battery is dead for what it is worth.

interesting thanks for the info

sounds like something somewhere is not quite configured right, or something is plain unhappy for some reason, sadly its quite hard to work it all out without an actual hands on,

from the info you have provided me, is it repeating "volume is not bootable" then loading the tool box rom and ending up on a frozen happy mac?, if so it sounds like ether BootX is not installed properly (under install there will be an install BootX option) or xpostfacto is telling the machine to boot off of the wrong partition...

it might also be OpenFirmware does not like how the drive is formatted, was the drive formatted/partitioned in Mac OS 9 or OS X?

PRAM battery in this case should not matter seeing as power is supplied to the machine across reboots etc.

oh well, welcome to the world of Old world ROM Macs what a PITA they can be hopefully soon ill have my own 6500, although the seller says it has 64MB of RAM so if I manage to secure the machine ill have to acquire more RAM before I can commence with OS X fun... (not helped by the fact ebay seems to be dry of suitable DIMMs...)

 

[weckart]

ill have to acquire more RAM before I can commence with OS X fun... (not helped by the fact ebay seems to be dry of suitable DIMMs...)

A propos RAM are the dimms required ECC or not? They seem to be buffered in any case.

Re: Partitioning. This was done with Tiger on the MDD. I had no problem installing 9.1 on the 6500 so OF seems happy with the partitioning. The only feedback I get is within OF. I can try delving into XPF's log on Friday and see if that sheds any light on the matter.

 

[LightBulbFun]

A propos RAM are the dimms required ECC or not? They seem to be buffered in any case.

Re: Partitioning. This was done with Tiger on the MDD. I had no problem installing 9.1 on the 6500 so OF seems happy with the partitioning. The only feedback I get is within OF. I can try delving into XPF's log on Friday and see if that sheds any light on the matter.

in regards to RAM AFAIK the 6500 only works with normal 5v 168 pin EDO or FPM DIMMs I dont know what ECC ones do and I doubt buffered ones would work... 128MB sticks will work they just show up as 64MB each its a good way to max out a 6360-6500 tho as some 64MB sticks will only show up as 32MB (you need 2K refresh sticks to see all of said stick)

booting Mac OS 9 is done via the Tool Box ROM which has its own drivers (its why Mac OS 7-9 are not affected by the 8GB barrier) which are a LOT less picky/buggy than open firmware on these OWR macs

 

[weckart]

in regards to RAM AFAIK the 6500 only works with normal 5v 168 pin EDO or FPM DIMMs I dont know what ECC ones do and I doubt buffered ones would work

OK. It's just that I saw this on eBay

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/64MB-Apple-Powermac-Performa-168-pin-EDO-5V-Buffered-DIMM-/391702662602

in other words, FB-DIMMs like with the MacPro 1,1. I just checked with Apple's service manual for the 6500 as online info is lacking and it seems that buffered is a must with the 6500.

For the Power Macintosh 6500, use 168-pin, 5-volt buffered extended data out (EDO) mode, 60ns or faster, 2K refresh rate DIMMs. Do not use DIMMs with a 4K refresh count.

Well, that is going to make finding cheap RAM that much easier. At least you don't need a matched pair. Here's Wikipedia on registered RAM fyi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_memory.

 

[LightBulbFun]

OK. It's just that I saw this on eBay

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/64MB-Apple-Powermac-Performa-168-pin-EDO-5V-Buffered-DIMM-/391702662602

in other words, FB-DIMMs like with the MacPro 1,1. I just checked with Apple's service manual for the 6500 as online info is lacking and it seems that buffered is a must with the 6500.



Well, that is going to make finding cheap RAM that much easier. At least you don't need a matched pair. Here's Wikipedia on registered RAM fyi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_memory.

well colour me surprised not sure how I would of missed that LOL (I have read the dev notes many times before...)

if buffered RAM works then indeed it should make finding RAM a lot easier well I say that, a quick check on ebay again, most of it is 3.3v and ECC...

 

[AphoticD]

---- ALTIVEC ----​

 

[redheeler]

Since I was only able to find a single low-res shot of Mac OS X Server in this entire thread...

Got a Mac OS X Leopard Server retail install disk earlier this week and today installed onto my current best PowerPC Mac, my first time running a server version of Mac OS X that predates the App Store. Still seems to be pretty capable, though outdated and probably with known vulnerabilities.

I do wonder if it would be possible to install newer versions of Apache/PHP and use this as a modern web server, but truthfully I already have a Mac Pro running Sierra Server for that.

 

[AphoticD]

Since I was only able to find a single low-res shot of Mac OS X Server in this entire thread...
View attachment 725304
Got a Mac OS X Leopard Server retail install disk earlier this week and today installed onto my current best PowerPC Mac, my first time running a server version of Mac OS X that predates the App Store. Still seems to be pretty capable, though outdated and probably with known vulnerabilities.

I do wonder if it would be possible to install newer versions of Apache/PHP and use this as a modern web server, but truthfully I already have a Mac Pro running Sierra Server for that.

What a beautiful Server UI!

I imagine Homebrew or MacPorts would allow you to update to a current web stack, then you could manually use symbolic links for the default binary paths. In theory, things should click into place so long as there were no major infrastructure changes for support files.

I have Leopard Server setup in VMware Fusion as it is fully supported and makes a usable test machine for Leopard-Intel app support.

 

[redheeler]

What a beautiful Server UI!

It really is beautiful, I was thinking I even prefer it to Apple's current Server app for MacOS Sierra. Simple to set up, but the more advanced stuff is there for when you need it. Even MySQL is built in, which is not the case for Sierra's Server app.

I imagine Homebrew or MacPorts would allow you to update to a current web stack, then you could manually use symbolic links for the default binary paths. In theory, things should click into place so long as there were no major infrastructure changes for support files.

These methods are compatible with PowerPC Leopard? Not too familiar with either, only once used Homebrew to install something on an Intel Mac.

I have Leopard Server setup in VMware Fusion as it is fully supported and makes a usable test machine for Leopard-Intel app support.

I didn't think of virtualizing it on a newer Intel Mac, but you're right, the server version is supported to virtualize. Should make an image of my install disk and try it for fun sometime.

 

[AphoticD]

These methods are compatible with PowerPC Leopard? Not too familiar with either, only once used Homebrew to install something on an Intel Mac.

Yes, but I should say TigerBrew for PPC Tiger/Leopard ‘brewing.

MacPorts is possibly a little more on the stable side, whereas Tigerbrew is more experimental. Either way, they both work and in my experience, ‘brew is quicker to install and often doesn’t require as much compiling from source.

 

[laptech]

This is my recently unearthed hidden away Ti G4

 

[ljonesj]

i picked up a g3 blue and white 400 mhz was trying to use my ide to sata adpater to use my ssd 128 gb but it would not boot up with it think i was over the size limi on it

 

[Macdctr]

Picked up my second PowerBook G3 "Kanga" this week. My first Kanga screen:

and this is my new Kanga screen: