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Powerbook 190cs full refurbishment & re-cap

androda

Well-known member
I'm trying to use an SD to ide adapter as the hard drive in my 190, and it's been a pain. Had to install it in my Wallstreet to format as HFS, but now the system 7.5.2 installer (floppy) tells me the disk is locked (despite having literally just formatted it in my Wallstreet with no issues). At least it sees the thing.

Any ideas how to get around 'The selected disk is locked'?

 

androda

Well-known member
My freakish workaround was to format the SD card in the SD-IDE adapter in OS X as HFS, then the 7.5.2 disk utility boot disk told me it needed to be initialized and now it no longer says the SD-IDE adapter is locked.  Thus the installer lets me select the SD-IDE adapter as the install destination.  So yay for that.

But now the installer is telling me that `The Installer document "System 7.5.2 Installation" is unusable for installation.`

So that's not great.  I pulled my disk images from here: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/mac-os-752-powerbooks-190-5300

So I'm guessing something is wrong with those images.  Now I need to find another source.

 

stormy

Well-known member
I found a site here that has some images you could try: http://www.savagetaylor.com/2018/01/05/setting-up-your-vintage-classic-68k-macintosh-using-a-scsi2sd-adapter/

I am not an expert on Macs to be honest, my _only_ experience with vintage Macs has been restoring this machine and an 840av recently. If I were asked to install the OS from scratch again I would be scratching my head as I remember there quite a few loops to jump through. Luckily with this machine it came with a fully installed stock version of 8.1 that I simply imaged to my CF card. I personally would advise *against* using IDE > SD. Reason being that CF cards are electrically compatible with IDE and as such don't requite any translation layer, in other words, better compatibility. IDE to SD devices use a translation chip that converts IDE signals to SD, so it adds an extra layer of interpretation to the mix.

The 190 is quite picky with the CF adapters though for some reason, the one I found to be compatible is this type below. Luckily they are quite easy to find around ebay and amazon etc.

Hope this helps,

SD-CF-2IDE-U.main-500x500.jpg

 
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beachycove

Well-known member
If you find that connector, please post a link on here. I too have a corroded battery connector in a 190.
 

Franklinstein

Well-known member
I was also curious about the battery connector. Sometimes you can find the part number molded on the original and find the same or a very similar part. I did this for the 5x0 series a while back and something turned up but they weren't in stock or active production and minimum order was something like 500 pieces at $3/ea so I didn't go too much further with that. Maybe one day.

As for the full '040 upgrade, I dabbled in this a little and it's not really cut-and-dry: Motorola/Freescale/NXP use odd naming conventions and it can be difficult to get the part you're looking for. The still-in-production 68040V is easy to find and it suggest it's a full '040 but it actually has no FPU (and it prefers to run at lower voltages and may have some different signals for additional low power states that the PB 190 couldn't utilize). They still build the classic LC and EC040 but I'm not sure they still build a proper full '040 in a QFP like that because there's really no demand (embedded stuff often has no need of FPUs and nobody really uses '040s for anything but embedded applications anymore); you may have to get them NOS on eBay or some surplus site. Maybe there's a certain mask number to look for (L88M, for example) to verify you're in the correct production era for a 5V full '040?
 

3lectr1cPPC

Well-known member
Also curious if you ever found the proper link to the battery connector, I wouldn't know what to look for on mouser.
 
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