iMac G3 usb, cd issues

[cylindricpanda]

I recently rescued a working g3/350 from being e-wasted, and it has 9.1 installed on it. I'm planning on upping it to 9.2.1 or .2. I also have a modern 128gb USB3 usb drive that I formatted in os x lion as mac os standard, but when I plugged into the iMac it couldn't read it, and asked to format it. Sure no problem I thought, if I format it here it should still work fine in os x. So I do that, and it shows up fine, but for some reason the permissions are messed up. I set it in os9 to 'anyone can read or write' but in os x it says I can only read it, and if I get info, there's no dropdown to change permissions. I was holding off on doing a clean reinstall of 9.1, but would that solve some of that issue since I'm not the administrator acct (I assume, anyway, it's been a while since I messed with accounts in os9)

as a stopgap until I got the usb sorted out, to get some files on it I burned a disc with toast 10 titanium as mac only, at 8x speed, and the iMac couldn't read that either, it seemed to think it was formatted as a ProDOS format disc, should I have burned it as mac/pc, or maybe the iso 9660 format instead?

 

[cylindricpanda]

I also tried a reburn of the same disc with just OS X's built-in burner and the iMac read it with no issue so maybe I just had a setting mis-set

 

[Byrd]

Anything > 120GB will probably cause LBA48 addressing issues on an older Mac; you could partition the drive limiting the capacity to ~ 119GB as a trial. Also modern USB3 devices may just not play nice with USB 1.1 standards.

Sounds like you used the wrong setting under Toast

 

[cylindricpanda]

well I reformatted it as a 16gb stick with thr rest of it just as free space, it couldn't read that either but when I rereformatted it as 114gb in os9 I was able to copy stuff onto it in os x. so yay I guess, just weird is all.

 

[Cory5412]

Great that this is working now! I wonder if it's just being weird because it's flash and OS 9 isn't detecting it the same way a modern computer would. SD and CF cards have worked well for me but I don't use many flash drives on old Macs, I primarily use USB pocket hard drives.

USB and firewire hard disks up to 2TB work great in Mac OS 9.x, LBA48 is a concern only for the onboard IDE on these machines.

THe one real limit is that Mac OS 9 itself has trouble booting on volumes over 200GB, but if you had a 2TB hard disk in a bootable position on such a machine, you could format it as, say, 100GB boot and the rest of the disk as data and it would be fine.

This applies as far back as system 7.6.1 on 68040 Macs, on HFS Standard.

However: I think at some point Mac OS X stopped including the option to put the OS 9 drivers on the disk when you format it. My recommendation is to format the drive on the OS 9 machine and then put data on it with your newer Mac. HFS+ should work fine for cross-compatibility between 9.x and 10.x.

I can't speak to flash drives, but 1-2TB USB 3.0 hard disks do work fine on USB Macs.

And: For the most part, OS 9 itself doesn't have accounts, it was there as an option but very few people used it, so if the machine didn't ask for a password when it turned on, you are the administrator/only user.