eBay Score! PBG3 PDQ loaded with accessories.

[Anonymous Freak]

Saw a PowerBook G3 listed for relatively cheap, $25 minimum bid, so I put it on my watch list.  With 4 days to go, it had two bids, up to $30.  I figured I'd bid $31 on a lark, just to see if I could get it.

What do you know - I did!



Pretty pedestrian system: PowerBook G3, 14.1" screen, 266 MHz G3, 320 MB RAM, stock 4 GB hard drive with OS 9 and Jaguar loaded on it.

The amazing thing to me were all the accessories it came with.  CD-ROM drive, yes.  Original plus third-party battery (both dead, sadly.) DVD-ROM drive plus "Macintosh PowerBook DVD-VIdeo PC Card For PowerBook G3 Series" card. Original Apple Floppy Drive module (what I really wanted it for - the latest Mac with an Apple-shipped floppy drive, finding one has been a serious hunt!) VST Zip module, Macally USB CardBus adapter, Lucent WaveLAN Gold card, and a "CapSure real-time video capture and display for your laptop" PC Card.  Plus an original "Flying Saucer" power brick and a third-party car/airplane power brick!  Lastly, a selection of software on CD-ROM.  Most of them are games (Doom II, Quake, three third-party Doom II or Quake add-on packs, Unreal, Diablo, Diablo II, Myth II) plus a "Microsoft Wine Guide" and, oh-la-la, Fischer's Erotic Encyclopedia - "Includes over 1000 pictures representing 37,000 years of erotic art"



The system booted.

Once.

Barely.

It booted to Mac OS 9, but with "disk errors" and when it finally booted, letters in the interface were randomly replaced.  Tried to restart, hard drive failed hard.

Oh well, I have plenty of spare 2.5" ATA hard drives.

Or I thought I did.  I had three Toshiba 40 GB ATA hard drives.  Two of them were failed.  (One went "SQUEEEEE!" when it tried to spin up, another just went "tick, tick, tick".). The third one is working (for now - now that I recall, I've had two other Toshiba 40 GB 2.5" ATA hard drives that have failed. So out of five, I'm down to one working one.)

Got a working drive in, and the display backlight went out.  :-/

Well, it did technically work when I received it.  For all of 10 minutes.  But it works with the replacement drive, and using an external display.  (The internal backlight will come on occasionally for a minute or two.)

But, hey! I can use a CD (or even DVD) at the same time as an 800k floppy disk! I'm pretty sure this is the only portable Mac that can have both drive types internal at the same time. (If you don't want a battery.)

 

[Anonymous Freak]

In the couple minutes it was booted, I could tell that the hard drive had a fresh install of Mac OS 9.2.2 and Mac OS X 10.2.  No personal files or third-party applications obviously present.

Too bad, I don't know where I'm going to get drivers for the CapSure card.

Edit: Of course, Macintosh Repository appears to have them! iREZ CapSure Zoomed Video driver

Once I get OS 9 re-loaded, I'll see if I can get it to work.

Edit 2: Dammit. I have OS 9.2 and 10.2 installed (on separate partitions,) but neither one is willing to boot. Booting from CD sees the internal hard drive, sees the partitions I created (yes, OS X is on the first, <8 GB partition,) but isn't willing to boot from them...  

I set a boot partition in System Disk control panel, doesn't. work. Just ? floppy. I try holding 'D' during boot, no help.  Try Cmd-Opt-Del, no help.  It will only boot to CD for some reason... :?:

 

[just.in.time]

I had been watching that auction, the capture card had me intrigued. Let me know how well it works when you get it up and running. Good job on the win.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Yeah, I honestly didn't expect to win it - all the other Wallstreets with floppy drives were going for FAR more.  (The $50 shipping may have had something to do with this one not going for as much, but it was well-packed, and included a lot of accessories in the box, for that $50 shipping charge.) I had decided that $80 was my limit for a Wallstreet with floppy, and by gosh, I got it for almost exactly $80! (It ended up $82.45 including shipping.)

Edit: After more tweaking, I figured out that the screen backlight isn't bad, it just thought I had an external monitor plugged in when I didn't - after cleaning the VGA socket, it runs on the internal screen reliably.

Also, I couldn't get it to boot from the 40 GB drive, but I did a low-level format on the shipped 4 GB drive, and got it to install from the recovery/restore disc. Now it boots fine from the internal drive!  It apparently wasn't bad, just the install that was on it had gotten corrupt somehow.

 

[galgot]

These are my favorite. And they run Rhapsody very well too. Have 8.6 on a 1gb partition and Rhapsody on the rest.
While in Rhapsody, you can tell the Bluebox to boot on your 1gb 8.6 part.
I like OSX server 1.2v3, can install ssh, lynx, alpine and stuff, and have that mix of Classic and NeXT feel , and still be able to run 8.6 via Bluebox.

 

[Carboy7]

Amazing find. I saw an HDI to SCSI adapter in there. Those are really useful.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Yeah, and it's the kind that can enable SCSI Disk Mode. I have quite a few HDI-to-xyz adapters (25-pin, 50-pin, 68-pin, even a couple custom ones for specific old devices,) but this is only my second SCSI Disk Mode-capable one.

 

[olePigeon]

Alright, Myth II!  One of my favorite games.  Since you now have the CD, you can download the OS X installer.  Myth II runs on modern Macs now, but requires the original CD to install.

 

[giovariot]

I recently bought a 661-2048 floppy drive for my PDQ G3 PowerBook.

I read everywhere on the internet that the PDQ floppy was the last SuperDrive one in a laptop, so I was very surprised to discover that my unit (marked 821-4156-A) doesn't read DD 800k floppies, not even through DiskCopy.

I noticed there are 2 different versions of the floppy drive for PDQ G3: 821-4156-A and 825-4267-A. I own the first, which one do you have? Did you successfully manage to access 800k disks.

Thanks in advance!

 

[AlpineRaven]

wow.. very nice!
Cheers

AP