PowerBook G3 Wallstreet & 2.5" IDE Hard Drive Cloning

[JDW]

I bought a second PowerBook G3 Wallstreet & accessories off EBAY recently:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/250925797720

I had hoped to snap it up for under $100, but another bidder got feisty with me and I had to whip out my bidding bat. But in light of all that was included, I still considered it a reasonably good deal. (Some will say the Pismo or Lombard are better machines overall, but I wanted this for the serial/LocalTalk capability which the Pismo and Lombard don't have.)

Anyway, this Wallstreet comes with an 80GB IDE internal hard drive that has OS 9 and Tiger on it. I want to buy an OWC SSD with IDE interface, as shown here ( because it

is faster, has lower power consumption, produces less heat, and is lighter):

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDMLP040/

My intent will be to move all the content of the existing 80GB hard drive over to the SSD (I assume it will fit, since the 80GB isn't maxed out). But since the 80GB drive is internet to the Wallstreet, and if I buy the SSD as a bare drive, how would I go about "cloning" the 80GB drive to the 40GB SSD?

I have another Wallstreet, but I have no HDI-30 SCSI adapters or cables. And the only other SCSI machine I have is an SE/30. I could buy an HDI-30 adapter or cable. But I want to know what is the best way to do this. Again, I want to clone out the contents of the 80GB drive and put them on the SSD, which I will then put inside the Wallstreet (after having removed the 80GB drive).

Any specifics you can give, including specific URLs on where I need to purchase what you suggest would be appreciated.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Thank you.

 

[MacJunky]

Either use a desktop Mac or even just one with USB.. or you could get a USB CardBus card and one of those little $15-$30 SATA/PATA -> USB boxes(OWC and most online PC stores have them) and use that.

Alternatively format. Starting fresh may not be a terrible idea.

 

[JDW]

Thank you for your reply, BUT...

1) The Wallstreet series does not have USB. You did not provide any specific URLs either about what is currently compatible and being sold for the Wallstreet series in that regard. Furthermore, a week ago I actually looked into USB options for the Wallstreet and didn't find much. A lot of people were just ranting about "problems" in various forums, and I didn't see a clear picture of the exact cardbus adapter I would need to get USB working.

2) I mulled the fresh-start approach originally, but I would prefer to clone the drive. Such will come in handy in the future too should I wish to make a cloned backup of the SSD once I made it the internal drive.

Further thoughts, especially from those of you who are experience with PowerBook G3 Wallstreets, would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

 

[MacJunky]

To be perfectly honest, yea, I could try to link you to one listed on a Canadian or American site, but being in Japan I would kiiinda suggest looking locally before committing to paying shipping costs.. though I do not know the availability of these things over there.

And I would like to say that I have a PDQ. Except I have a FireWire card for it. Also something that you might have a look for if you have a FireWire enclosure.

I can still see if I can dig up some links if you are really dead-set on ordering from the states.

Cardbus USB card:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/IOGear/GPU202/

Incredibly handy magic HDD box that I use a ton(but a different brand, I bought what was easily available here in Canada, same type of device though):

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/U3NVSPATA/

(I realize it says USB 3 in the title, but it is backward compatible)

That took all of five mins.

 

[JDW]

Thank you for the two links, especially those from OWC -- from whom I've been mulling the SSD purchase. And despite the shipping costs, I almost always buy outside Japan, and have for the last 17 years I've lived here. Further, I get paid in Japanese Yen, and you know what the Yen to Dollar exchange rate is these days!

With regard to that and other cardbus USB adapters, one thing I've noted is that you must have OS X installed on your PowerBook G3 before you can use USB2 speeds. Otherwise everything slows down to USB1 speeds, which is fine for a mouse, but painful in the extreme for any data related transfers, especially when you are talking about 20GB or more of data. More specifically, it seems that USB2.0 won't work on OS 8.x or 9.x at all, simply because of the lack of OS-level driver support for such.

In light of this, it may make more sense to go with what you are using now -- a cardbus firewire adapter. Even the firewire adapters won't work under OS 9 or earlier, right? If not, then the situation is the same as the USB cardbus adapters, except that the FIrewire adapter would theoretically be faster (when used under OS X). Of course, that would require me to purchase a Firewire case for the 2.5" IDE spinning platter drive, but I see that OWC sells those too.

So what are your thoughts on comparing a USB cardbus solution vs. a Firewire cardbus solution? (In terms of raw speed and compatibility.) And would you recommend a specific Firewire cardbus adapter?

Also, is there any other solution that might be considered OTHER THAN a USB or Firewire cardbus adapter, in order to clone the internal 2.5" drive to a second 2.5" drive. For example, what if I put the SSD in one of my Wallstreet's and then connected it to the other Wallstreet via Target Disk Mode. I would need to do that via SCSI though. And I've never tried it. Nor do I know if they even made HDI-30 to HDI-30 cables for that purpose.

Thanks again!

 

[MacJunky]

Well, SCSI on Macs is slow anyway. *IF* you can get a firewire card I would go for that. I have a Macally FH-BUS2 and it does work under OS 9, I am sure there are others out there too but I did not see others on OWC's site when I checked.

How about you use this(OS 9 compatible):

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Firmtek/SATA1SM2/

and then grab one of those SATA-IDE adapters or something? OWC has them for 3.5" drives, you might be able to find an adapter to connect your 2.5" drive to one.

I am going to be quite blunt here. You are giving yourself huge headaches by not having real computers capable of real tasks. Even something as simple as any sort of Mac that can handle USB 2 would make your life so much easier.

Actually! What if you used Xpostfacto to boot off a Mac OS X10.3/10.4 CD.. (or just boot it off a 10.2 disc, that works natively) and used the USB card to clone the drives? Mac OS never seems to like to clone the boot drive anyway; at least as far as I generally end up finding.

*shrug*

Anyway, it is 01:30 here, I have to go.

 

[JDW]

But I think older versions of OS X can clone the boot drive when using Disk Utility's RESTORE feature. And I believe Carbon Copy Cloner can as well.

Thanks for the cardbus Firewire adapter tip. OWC used to sell that one, but not any longer. I will keep an eye out for one, as such would be faster overall than USB, plus the USB cardbus adapters only give you USB2.0 speeds when running OS X, not when running OS 9. The Firewire card, from what you have said, would run in OS 9 too, which would be nice.

One of the Wallstreets I purchased came with a 500MHz G4 CPU accelerator, and Xfacto was used by the previous owner to install OS 10.4 Tiger on its 80GB internal IDE hard drive. So the OS is there and can be booted from.

Once again, the reason I purchased a Wallstreet was because the newer Lombards and Pismos lack the serial port & localTalk. I want to use the machine for many different tasks, including LocalTalking to my older machines that only have localTalk networking. I bought a second Wallstreet simply because it was a good deal. Plus I have two kids that love older OS 9 educational software that would run well on them. The only reason I started this thread was to determine the best way to clone a drive on these machines. Anyway, I appreciate your tips thus far.

 

[JDW]

I just wanted to add to this thread by saying that I believe the 40GB Legacy SSD I bought from OWC is defective. I've tried everything I can think of over the past month to get it to work, both with my PowerBook G3 Wallstreets and with my Intel i7 iMac (via external USB/FW400 case), but it just doesn't work. I've contacted OWC about it and still await their full response. But this is the second item in my OWC order that has been bad. The first was a defect CD-ROM (if you can believe it), which had Intech's HD SpeedTools 3.6 on it. After a bit of waiting and using their online chat service, they finally sent me the software via download link. But I must admit I am disappointed about the defective SSD. It even rattles when I shake it!

Yet more disappointments too. The Sonnet G4 card inside the second Wallstreet I purchased seems to be bad. Or partly bad. I don't understand it.

I ended up formatting the 2.5" drive in an external case connected to my G4 Cube running OS 9 via FW400. I initially used Intech's HD SpeedTools 3.6 (OS 9 edition) to format the drive into 3 partitions:

1) 650MB

2) 6.8GB

3) The remaining space

Benchmarks show a big speed bump in READs because of the optimization that the Intech driver offers. However, I had trouble booting from the drive after installing OS 9 on it. I would get the folder with the flashing "?" mark in it. So I reformatted the drive using Apple's Disk Utility, did a fresh install of OS 9, and then I could boot. It sickens me though because Intech SpeedTools is supposed to work with OS 9. I must therefore assume that it does work with OS 9, just not on a Wallstreet! Still makes me sick though. The Intech driver is faster than Apple's.

But my Sonnet 500MHz G4 card must have some problems because nothing I do will keep it from freezing. It's strange. It never freezes while the computer is booting. It only freezes once it gets to the desktop (in OS 9) and all the icons display. Sometimes it freezes right away, and other times it takes 30s, and other times it takes a couple minutes. Sometimes it will freeze when I do nothing at all. And other times it will freeze when I click around on screen.

Here are photos of the front/back sides of my Sonnet card, and my two sets of RAM:

https://picasaweb.google.com/103365672326265854011/PowerBookG3WallstreetStuff

I know the RAM is good because it works great in my stock Apple 266MHz CPU card. I even tried putting only one 64MB RAM card in the top slot of the Sonnet CPU card (some people online say that's a good test to perform), but the machine still locks up after booting to the OS 9 desktop. No freezes whatsoever when I use the 266MHz CPU card though, in either one of my two Wallstreets.