Help! Drive cloning frustration...trying to re-drive Lombard

[J English Smith]

Well, I may be backed into a tight corner. Just wondering if there is any way I can take the ingredients I have and make fire.

I have a Lombard drive that is noisy and failing. I hacked this one to run 10.4.11 and it is certainly a more pleasurable thing than running 9.x or 10.3.x And yet, taking a virgin IDE drive and getting from 10.4.6 to 10.4.11 is painful. So I was trying to be slick and get a drive enclosure, use Carbon Copy Cloner and copy the drive, then caddy it and boot up.

I have a new IDE 20 gb drive, with a clean Fat 32 format from my windows machine, but the enclosure I ordered was USB 2.0. When I plug that USB into the Lombard, it does not seem to recognize it as a drive. Not sure if the problem is the USB 2.0 or the drive format. My only options in Win are Fat 32 or NTFS.

I have access to Pismos, but no Mac newer than that. Anything I can do here? Or, at least, if I could get the USB 2.0 drive to a newer Mac, and I format to a Mac-recognized format, would I be able to install it as the HD and then copy the OS from the install disk?

I just thought it would be great to actually do this as a clone using CCC rather than have to build the whole thing up again on a Pismo and then swap to the Lombard. Ugh. Very time-consuming.

Advice appreciated...I didn't think about the USB 2.0/1.0 problem.

 

[gobabushka]

It should show up in Disk Utility. If not though, I would suggest that you pick up a USB 2.0 CardBus Card and try that. Especially because the clone would take foreVER over USB 1.1. Also, I would try plugging in the device before you turn the computer on, and make sure the drive is actually getting power. I kno that would seem obvious, but I have had a couple usb powered drives be VERY picky.

 

[J English Smith]

Finally got it to work with a Pismo last night, so I just cloned that drive/OS rather than the one on the Lombard. I was able to reformat the drive and then CCC clone the drive. Yeah, it did take several hours, I knew it would be slow, but better than the gazillion separate updates when going from 10.4.6 to 10.4.11.

Tonight I'll swap out the drive in the Lombard and see if the new drive works successfully as a boot drive. Fingers crossed! It hit one bit of bad data on this drive, a dictionary. Interesting as that hadn't been caught before in the disk repair on this HD. Must be a very small bad sector of the disk.

 

[gobabushka]

One thing you might try next time would be the combo update to 10.4.11. Then just update from there. I usually do that on my macs. Like on my macbook, I ran the combo update to 10.6.8 then ran updates from there, same thing on my pismo, 10.4.11 then from there it was smooth sailing! I'm glad you got it working though!

 

[J English Smith]

Tested again to see if the Lombard can see the drive via the USB cable. It can't. Will still probably be fine as a boot drive.

Does anyone know - were the Lombards USB 1.0 and the Pismos USB 2.0? Did they change the USB controller for the new model?

 

[gobabushka]

Nope, the pismo is still USB 2.0 Trust me...

 

[J English Smith]

But what I mean is - is the Lombard still USB 1.0 - won't recognize a 2.0 hook?

 

[johnklos]

You're overthinking things. First, buy a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter for $5 USD:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812119245

Plug the drive into a newer Mac, install 10.4, run all the updates, then install it into your laptop.

All USB 2 devices will work with USB 1.1 ports, but slower.

Carbon Copy Cloner isn't even necessary. Disk Utility's restore function can copy a bootable drive to another drive.

 

[J English Smith]

Update...this has certainly been an exercise in frustration!If only the damn Lombards would run 10.4 natively!

After failing to get a bootable drive copy using CCC, I used a Pismo to first re format the new hard drive to Mac format (journaled) and then made a recovery copy from that working Pismo's drive to the drive connect via USB. Took many hours, but it appeared to copy successfully.

However, when I install that cloned drive in a Pismo or a Lombard, I get the same thing: chime, grey apple, then a circle with slash - the "NO" symbol. No progress beyond that point.

I am now attempting to boot that Pismo from the CD drive and it is not wanting to mount from my 10.4.6 disk. That may just be a balky CD drive. But c'mon, Apple, throw me a bone here.

Are there some 2.5 drives that just CAN'T be used with a Pismo or Lombard? I am starting to think this project is doomed. This new drive is a 20gb Toshiba, nothing fancy.

 

[zuiko21]

Could be an incompatible drive. I have read that the Lombard's disk controller (or was it the firmware?) has problems with some ATA-100 drives, whereas an ATA-66 or maybe ATA-133 would be fine:

http://lowendmac.com/pb2/lombard-powerbook-g3.html

 

[J English Smith]

Whatever it was, this one was no go in the Pismo too, so I am back to doing the sequential updating...once I got the DVD drive to boot up the OS on about the 4th try or so...I'm currently on all of the Java updates from 10.4.6 to 10.4.11...

Weird. You'd think there was a way to make a bootable copy via USB transfer, but I couldn't figure it out. At least I can use that drive enclosure to house a portable drive.

And the new drive works, and is quiet...so got there ugly, but got there in the end.