Cloning a PB G3 2.5" IDE Hard Drive with an SE/30?

[JDW]

I submitted this post in the PPC PowerBook forum, but since I have a SCSI compact Mac (and since there is an utter dearth of replies in that PPC PowerBook forum) I thought it best to post it again here...

The situation is that I recently acquired a PowerBook G3 Wallstreet PDQ 266 off EBAY for $15. It's in great condition for that price. I bought it after being inspired by a fellow 68kMLA member who had used the PB G3 as a go-between machine to get his Mac512k hooked up to Lion Macs and the internet. Anyway, shortly after that purchase I began a search for Wallstreet CPU upgrades and found all manner of issues in getting them to work since CPU cards made by Sonnet must be flashed and they cannot be reflashed. Since most of them are sold "used" you cannot use the CPU card unless it was flashed in a Wallstreet that has the same ROM as yours. Cutting to the chase though... A week later I found the holy grail of Wallstreets, which included the CPU upgrade I had been searching for, plus other parts to:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/250925797720

I had hoped to snap it up for under $100, but another bidder got feisty with me and I had to whip out my bidding bat. But in light of all that was included, I still considered it a reasonably good deal. (Some will say the Pismo or Lombard are better machines than any of the Wallstreet series, but I wanted the Wallstreet for the serial/LocalTalk capability which the Pismo and Lombard lack.)

Anyway, this second Wallstreet I purchased comes with an 80GB IDE internal hard drive that has OS 9 and Tiger on it. I want to buy an OWC SSD with IDE interface, as shown here (because it is faster, has lower power consumption, produces less heat, and is lighter):

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDMLP040/

My intent will be to move all the content of the existing 80GB hard drive over to the SSD (I assume it will fit, since the 80GB isn't maxed out). But since the 80GB drive is internet to the Wallstreet, and if I buy the SSD as a bare drive, how would I go about "cloning" the 80GB drive to the 40GB SSD?

Please keep in mind that I have never owned a PowerBook before, so I am a complete novice when it comes to dealing with them. Hand-holding would be greatly appreciated.

As I said, I have another Wallstreet too, if that would help transferring data from one drive to another, but I have no HDI-30 SCSI adapters or cables. And the only other SCSI machine I have is an SE/30, to which I have an HD20SC attached (the drive mechanism inside it is actually 4.5GB). I could buy an HDI-30 adapter or cable if needed to transfer the data from my 80GB drive to the 40GB SSD, but I want to know what is the best way to do this. Again, I want to clone out the contents of the 80GB drive and put them on the SSD, which I will then put inside the Wallstreet (after having removed the 80GB drive).

Any specifics you can give, including specific URLs on where I need to purchase what you suggest would be appreciated.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Thank you.

 

[theos911]

A. That is one PIMP'D Wallstreet! Nice Score!

B. Are you aware of how to remove the HDD?

C. It would likely be easiest to get a USB -> IDE adapter and use a USB machine with OS X and use Disk Utility to clone it.

 

[JDW]

Hi, Theos911. Thanks again for your post of solidarity about SSD pricing in the OWC Blog. I still would like to encourage the rest of you reading this to do the same. It's never too late to ask and receive!

Yes, my second PB G3 Wallstreet was truly a great score indeed. It would have been better had another fellow not bid against me though, as the opening price was about $80. Even so, once you add up all the prices of what individual parts would cost, I still consider it a good deal.

Since the seller was unwilling to ship direct to me in Japan, I had him ship to a family member in California, who in turn will ship it to me. It costs me more than way, but until more sellers realize there's nothing to fear by shipping direct to Japan, I'll have to live with it. Most sellers are reasonable though, and in my 17 years of living in Japan, I've only had a few hardcore sellers like this who refused to sell anything except to The Land of the Free, Home of the Brave ("brave" of course at all times except when shipping outside the country).

Since I haven't received the computer yet, I completely overlooked a couple important facts in my posts yesterday. Upon closer examination of the Wallstreet system I just won, I see that it not only comes with a USB cardbus adapter, but it also comes with a Firewire cardbus adapter too! My eyes didn't even see that when I bid for the item. I had been so enamored by the fact it had the CPU card I was seeking that I overlooked everything else.

More specifically, the two cardbus cards included are the following:

• AKE USB 2.0 cardbus

• Adaptec FireConnect cardbus

The only thing is, the seller didn't setup those cards to work on the computer, and it doesn't seem clear that any CDs or drivers were included. That means to get them to work, I would need to hunt down the driver. I visited the Adaptec site and found this page:

http://www.adaptec.com/en-us/support/_eol/fireconnect/afw-1430/

But sadly, there is no downloadable image of the CD that was originally included with the FireConnect card, which has the Mac drivers.

But assuming I can find the drivers and get it to work, I believe the Firewire card would be better than the USB card when connecting to an external drive. Because based on what I have read, the FireConnect Firewire card will work in OS 9 (the OS I primarily intend to use with these Wallstreets), whereas the USB card will drop to USB1 speeds under OS 9.

OWC has some refurbished 2.5" IDE drive enclosures for $40, which I am keeping my eye on:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Macally/PHR250CC/

So I am thinking about putting a 40GB OWC "Legacy" edition SSD in the external enclosure, then clone the internal 80GB drive (which contains much less than 80GB on it) to the external SSD, and then swap out the internal 80GB drive and replace it with the SSD.

No, I've never swapped out a PowerBook hard drive before, as I am brand new to them. Any advice you can offer would of course be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[theos911]

Hi, Theos911. Thanks again for your post of solidarity about SSD pricing in the OWC Blog. I still would like to encourage the rest of you reading this to do the same. It's never too late to ask and receive!

Still awaiting moderation...

AKE USB 2.0 cardbus

Some people manage to make them work under OS 9. When I researched mine, it had a chipset that had worse documentation than cave paintings. Some super generic crapset with no drivers to be found. It's chipset is specifically listed as not-compatible with OS 9 in some thread somehwere explaining the best/worst USB Cardbus cards for PPC Mac OS & X. The linux drivers didn't work under MintPPC either, apparently no PPC support. I guess they have switched chipsets a few times for all these inconsistencies...

The firewire card is likely your better option.

To get to the HDD:

Pull out of the two tabs on the front of the computer. This will empty the two expansion bays. Then, feel around on the top inside of the expansion slot for a slider that can be pulled back. Pull back both of these and the keyboard will pop out. The HDD will be sitting to the right of the CPU.

 

[Bunsen]

Get a generic Cardbus USB controller and an external 2.5" IDE to USB case would be the cheapest and simplest solution, I would think. Put the SSD in the external first, clone the internal, then exchange them. I don't think the Wallstreet can boot from USB, hence doing the clone before the transplant.

And USB is always a nice thing to add to a "bridge" machine

/eta/ Oh, I see it comes with Firewire and USB cards - nice You won't actually need drivers, they're built in to OS 8.6 and above. At worst you may have to download the relevant components from Apple.

By the way, I agree, that's a nice price for a G4 upgraded Wallstreet with all those extras.

 

[zuiko21]

Not sure if my experience applies here, but I was never able to make work the CardBus FireWire card on my Lombard, from 8.6 to 9.2.2

USB is likeley to work, but at 1.1 speed anyway -- pretty slow by today's (and yesterday's...) standards.

 

[JDW]

Gentlemen, thank you for the advice about drive cloning on the Wallstreet. But aside from cardbus USB and Firewire solutions, there is yet another option available:

MCE Expansion Bay Kit for 2.5" Drives, for Wallstreets ($69+shipping):

http://store.mcetech.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=XPKIT&Category_Code=STORHDLTPB&Product_Count=5

http://www.mcetech.com/manuals/xpebhd98v2kit_ig-ss.pdf

And sold for only $40 (+shipping) by L.A. Computer Company right now:

http://www.lacomputercompany.com/cgi-bin/rpcart/index.cgi?command=dispitem&type=sku&sku=26412

I wrote to LA Computer yesterday, but they've not replied back to me. I also wrote to MCE too, but they didn't reply back to me either. I am quite dissatisfied with such apathy toward customers, and such casts a dark cloud over the product itself. Nevertheless, putting emotion and human foolishness aside, focusing exclusively on the technology itself, my questions remain.

Specifically, I want to know if the MCE Expansion Bay kit would yield the same or better performance than a Firewire drive attached to the Wallstreet via cardbus adapter. Does anyone know?

I found the following discussion thread. Open the page and then do a keyword search for "Multi-Word DMA" to jump to the right post there:

http://forums.macnn.com/69/mac-notebooks/60105/external-hd-vs-internal-hd/

Assuming that poster is correct and knows what he's talking about (sadly, I cannot confirm it), he indicates the Expansion Bay drive would not be as fast as the primary internal drive attached directly to the Wallstreet's IDE bus. But my original question remains, how fast is a Firewire external drive (assuming a fast drive mechanism, of course), in comparison to the main IDE connection and the Expansion Bay connection? And if there is a difference, is it a noticeable difference in speed?

Surely someone out there must know the answer to this basic question, but after much Googling I could not find the specifics on it. I therefore look forward to hearing your thoughts. Thanks!

 

[JDW]

I see it comes with Firewire and USB cards - nice You won't actually need drivers, they're built in to OS 8.6 and above. At worst you may have to download the relevant components from Apple.

Unfortunately, the Adaptec FireWire PC Card doesn't mount my external 2.5" OWC 40GB SSD drive in OS 10.4 on the Wallstreet (XpostFacto), so it would appear that drivers are truly needed for use with that particular card. There is nothing wrong with my SSD itself though. I know this because when I put in a USB PC card into the same Wallstreet, it mounts the SSD just fine. I was able to reformat and partition it too (in OS 10.4 via XpostFacto). I just wanted to try to get Firewire to work, so I could do benchmark comparisons on the speed.

 

[JDW]

Here's a reply I got back from Adaptec, manufacturer of my FireConnect Cardbus PC card:

The Adaptec Firewire controller has been out of production for many years, the OHCI compliant drivers for these controllers are embedded in both Windows and MAC OS (and Linux), so no further drivers are available to download. There was originally a driver disk that included the generic Firewire redistributable drivers from Apple and Microsoft, but this disk is not needed as long as you have an OS installation of any modern version of Mac or Windows. If the card is not seen on your Mac, verify the Apple FireWire extensions are loaded and enabled.

And while that does basically repeat what Bunsen said to me earlier in this thread, it is still no help at all insofar as I cannot get any FireWire devices to mount.

 

[beachycove]

1. If you really need to clone the drive, get a couple of SCSI adapters and a cable, startup in SCSI target mode, and do what comes naturally.

2. Buy or borrow a SCSI CD burner or large backup drive/ cables.

3. In OS9, you also have LocalTalk and infrared to play with, but I don't know how far that would get you.

I have the SCSI cables if you are not afraid of overseas postal rates.... However, were I you, I would personally just source the necessary software and do a fresh installation.

 

[JDW]

Beachy, I appreciate your thoughts. However, I ultimately cloned the drive via SuperDuper running in OS 10.4 (Xpostfacto) via USB (cardbus PC card).

My main problem now is with crashing and drive errors. After a hefty number of reboots, both partitions of my drive are quite nearly unbootable. Prior to getting this bad, I was able to very the drives with Disk Utility in Tiger, and there were "sibling" errors and other such nonsense that Disk Utility refused to repair. I then plopped in Disk Warrior 4.1 and repaired the directory, but then when I checked it via Disk Utility it gave me a different incurable error.

I must say this particular machine is frustrating. It drops into Open Firmware about every time I use Xpostfacto to switch between OS 9 and OS X Tiger. And then it tells me my login is invalid, even though it is not. (I simply don't have any password setup, so maybe that's it.)

But as of right now, I get the spinning spike wheel forever when I try to boot Tiger, and although it will boot into the OS 9 partition it locks up rather quickly, no matter what I do, even with Extensions turned off.

The PRAM battery is dead, but I have a good main battery. And of course the AC power is also connected.

This Wallstreet has a Sonnet 500MHz G4 card in it, which is why it can run OS 10.4 via Xpostfacto rather well. Surprisingly well, when it initially worked. But now even my clone drive is reporting the same errors I got on the internal drive. And I can't boot off the clone because I can get my Firewire card to work, and the USB card won't allow me to boot a USB drive. (My cloned drive is my OWC SSD in an 2.5" case, which has both Firewire and USB ports on it.)

Not sure if all Wallstreets are this flakey (I'm new to them), but this one is driving me up a wall!

 

[theos911]

Mine has never been flaky. (Stable under OS 9 & Debian, never used X on mine.) I'm going to guess it is the CPU card for the moment. Upgrades such as that are best removed and the machine returned to stock when checking other parts and then returned when all extensions and everything can be had and your environment is stable.

What I have found out is that normal USB -> 2.5 IDE cables are not sufficient for SSD's. My generic China adapter works fine on HDDs, but when I try a "fast" media, things go unreliably, unpredictably wrong on both reads and writes. However, this doesn't explain why your old HDD is messed up as well.

 

[JDW]

Thanks for your input, Theos. The main reason I bought this particular Wallstreet was because it was the holy grail of Wallstreets. RAM is maxed out to 500MB, it has an 80GB internal 2.5" IDE hard drive that is very fast, the processor is a 500MHz G4, it came with a Bookendz docking station (which I've not used yet), a good battery, the USB card, a Firewire card, the floppy drive module, a CD-ROM module, a DVD Module and an Apple branded PC card to decode DVD movies. Plus the hard drive was pre-partitioned for me by the seller, with OS X Tiger on the 8GB partition and OS 9 and various files on the 70GB partition.

But everything came to a halt last night after I cloned by internal drive to the external SSD. The USB connection had nothing to do with it. I used SuperDuper. I ticked "Repair Permissions before cloning." And once that was done, when I tried to reboot into OS X, all I got was the spinning spiked wheel. But it seems odd that repairing permissions would have done that. Even so, I had all manner of other errors on the drive (mentioned in my previous post) before I cloned my drive last night. So I don't know what to think.

I need to go home tonight and put in a fresh PRAM battery. I paid through the nose to get a brand new one from OWC. Plus I paid $100 to OWC for a brand new main battery too. I also paid for a copy of the OS 9 version of Intech's HD Speed Tools, but sadly my CD from OWC is defective (unreadable even on my iMac), and after a couple days of waiting, OWC still hasn't replied back about that.

Problems, problems and more problems. I feel plagued.

 

[JDW]

Here are a few photos of the items I purchased from OWC:

https://picasaweb.google.com/103365672326265854011/PowerBookG3WallstreetStuff

 

[coius]

It sounds like the SSD is bad. I encountered this with an OCZ Vertex Plus+.

Under windows, it worked OK, then it started getting errors. not booting, then I started getting bad blocks, and then SMART failed.

Pretty sure you got a bad drive. Sounds exactly like what I went through. If you have a PC, pop it in and try running a SMART-enabled utility. Bet it will fail block scan tests and/or SMART. to test, get something like Ultimate Boot CD. they have a diagnostic that will do a scan of the whole SSD (read and write) and see what it does.

 

[JDW]

coius, I appreciate your input. But you are mistaken. If you read through my previous posts, you will see that the data on the 80GB spinning platter drive inside my Wallstreet (the drive that came with the Wallstreet when I bought it) showed data errors when I tested in Apple's Disk Utility under OS 10.4.11. (I think that first error was an "invalid sibling link" error.) And even after using DiskWarrior 4.1 on that same spinning platter drive (despite DiskWarrior having given its "directory" a clean bill of health), Apple's Disk Utility still reported an unfixable error, although it was different that the first error I got. And so, I could never get my internal drive fully repaired, yet there was some software on that internal spinning platter drive I wanted to backup. And I thought I could copy it off cleanly using SuperDuper. But alas, after clone to my external SSD via USB and SuperDuper, I scanned my SSD with Apple's Disk Utility and it gave me the same error. And then I ran DiskWarrior on it and found that another error (unfixable) still was showing in Apple's Disk Utility.

So I don't know if the data was so corrupt it could not be repaired. Or if it is the case that the CPU upgrade in this Wallstreet is causing all the data to become corrupt? I honestly don't know what's going on, but the SSD is not bad. I am quite confident about that (one of the few things I am confident about).

So again, I don't see how a bad PRAM battery could be causing all this chaos, but to eliminate that variable, I will swap out that battery tonight (painstakingly, from what I see on iFixit). Then I may consider formatting my internal drive and reinstalling the OS. I really would like to get OS 10.4.11 back on it because that OS makes it more useful. But in the end, who knows, maybe I will only get OS 9 to work, on a single partition.

Any further thoughts would be appreciated.

 

[JDW]

Something else interesting to report. I just connected my SSD to my Intel iMac via Firewire and checked it with Lion's Disk Utility. It found allocation problems and suggested I click "Repair." I did that and a few seconds later it said it was fixed. I scanned it again and it gave a clean bill of health. Strange that Disk Utility in OS 10.4.11 couldn't fix it!

Sadly, I don't have a Wallstreet drive bay adapter for my SSD so I would need to break apart the Wallstreet to test it. Well, I will need to do that to swap the PRAM battery anyway, so I guess it won't take any extra effort.

 

[theos911]

Stress test the drive a bit from Lion.

You said you are confident it is good... which means if it is bad it won't get tested, so lets take care of the obvious "confident it isn't" problems. You are likely right, I've never had a bad OWC drive, but lets make sure.

 

[JDW]

I just tried reformatting my SSD using 1 partition (Apple Partition Map for PPC) via Disk Utility under lion, with the SSD connected to the Mac via Firewire. Disk Utility coughed up the following error:

"unable to write to the last block of the device"

Tried formatting several times, to no avail.

I then unmounted, yanked the Firewire cable, then connected to my iMac via the drive's USB interface. This time Disk Utility allowed me to partition it. I then copied a 700MB disk image to the drive (via USB) and after that a 7GB file too. No problems.

Not sure what the deal is with the Firewire connection. This is a FW400 drive, so I had to use this adapter in order to plug it into my Intel iMac:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/FIR1369AD/

Anyway, with the drive still connected via USB, after copying those big files, I then ran another Disk Utility check on the SSD. No problem. I then erased it in Disk Utility. No problems.

UPDATE: I just ran Intech's SpeedTools Utilities Pro 3.7 on my iMac, using the Test Data Transfer Integrity function. I set the Test Size to 1MB and duration of 10 minutes. The average WRITE speed via the rather slow IDE interface of this external drive got me 28.6MB/s, and READ speed of 29.6MB/s (connected to the Mac via USB). No errors to report. I think this proves the SSD is good.

I also tried the same Transfer Test via the FireWire connection. It failed. So I then looked through my OWC SSD box and found a USB cable that has a power connector at the other end. It made sense that this drive must not be getting the power it needs via the FireWire cable (perhaps due to the FW800-FW400 adapter?), so I connected the power to the drive (via USB from my iMac) and then used the FireWire cable for data transfer and started the test again. This time it completed the test without error. Average WRITEs were 24.6MB/s and READs were 35.5MB/s. Not sure why the READs are slower than USB, but the WRITES certainly are faster. No "fast" by any means, but that's understandable in light of the fact this is a "legacy" SSD with an older IDE/ATA interface.