pb190
Member
I bought a powerbook 190 on ebay recently. I am planning to install a m.2 SATA SSD in it to replace the existing IDE boot drive, just to see if it will work. I've gotten some very useful things to work on this machine:
* I can boot from a Compact Flash card in a PCMCIA adapter (formatted the card, then copied over my system folder). Once I boot from the PCMCIA card, I can then format my internal drive. More convenient than using an external SCSI drive.
* I bought a Farallon PN595a ethernet PCMCIA card. It is working with System 7.61.
* I "manually" installed Open Transport 1.3 (it kept asking for floppies Install 1 and Install 2 - I just had everything in a big folder on my hard drive. I just copied the various files to what seemed to be the right places). Once I installed that, I was able to connect to my OS X 10.4 iBook as a file server. I go to the chooser, and click the button to connect via TCP/IP.
I was not able to connect to my 10.4 Mac via TCP/IP until I installed the Open Transport 1.3 update. Previously it had Open Transport 1.12, and although it did have the button to connect via TCP/IP that did not work.
So in the end the ability to connect a 68k Mac to a 10.4 OS X server via ethernet is much more useful than being able to boot the machine from a SSD. But as soon as the 16Gb SSD comes in the mail, I will try to install it. BTW I am using IDE to m.2 SATA adapter, designed for the tiny 42mm drives. The host computer "thinks" you have an IDE drive, and you can use any m.2 SATA 42mm drive that you can find. There are plenty of drives out there. I even have a 250Gb m.2 SSD drive in a 17" powerbook G4 that is working great, so I am assuming this setup will work for my powerbook 190 as well since that's IDE.
The picture shows the 190 booting into 7.55 from a compact flash card, but I am now using 7.61 as I have a pre-built system 7.61 from my Mac support days in the 1990s.
* I can boot from a Compact Flash card in a PCMCIA adapter (formatted the card, then copied over my system folder). Once I boot from the PCMCIA card, I can then format my internal drive. More convenient than using an external SCSI drive.
* I bought a Farallon PN595a ethernet PCMCIA card. It is working with System 7.61.
* I "manually" installed Open Transport 1.3 (it kept asking for floppies Install 1 and Install 2 - I just had everything in a big folder on my hard drive. I just copied the various files to what seemed to be the right places). Once I installed that, I was able to connect to my OS X 10.4 iBook as a file server. I go to the chooser, and click the button to connect via TCP/IP.
I was not able to connect to my 10.4 Mac via TCP/IP until I installed the Open Transport 1.3 update. Previously it had Open Transport 1.12, and although it did have the button to connect via TCP/IP that did not work.
So in the end the ability to connect a 68k Mac to a 10.4 OS X server via ethernet is much more useful than being able to boot the machine from a SSD. But as soon as the 16Gb SSD comes in the mail, I will try to install it. BTW I am using IDE to m.2 SATA adapter, designed for the tiny 42mm drives. The host computer "thinks" you have an IDE drive, and you can use any m.2 SATA 42mm drive that you can find. There are plenty of drives out there. I even have a 250Gb m.2 SSD drive in a 17" powerbook G4 that is working great, so I am assuming this setup will work for my powerbook 190 as well since that's IDE.
The picture shows the 190 booting into 7.55 from a compact flash card, but I am now using 7.61 as I have a pre-built system 7.61 from my Mac support days in the 1990s.