pcamen
Well-known member
I've got a G3 Lombard PB I am setting up for floppy and CD archiving. Not a bad system, in good shape, with a 32GB CF card instead of an HD. It's got a VST Superdrive floppy instead of a stock floppy, which seem to be rarer than unicorns. It's got 10.4.x and 9.2.2 dual boot on the drive. This one has a Belkin WiFi card in addition to the built-in Ethernet.
I'm loving this thing because it lets me do so much:
- Can boot to 10.4 and os 9.
- 10.4 can AFP to my High Sierra machine (but apparently don't format it APFS or that ability will be gone).
- It's got SCSI so I can read / write SCSI disks
- It's got USB so I can read / write USB disks
- It can read and write both HFS and HFS+ disks
- At 1024x768 screen size at millions of colors, it is enough to work with comfortably, and I can add on a second external screen if need be.
Unless I'm missing something, this seems like the perfect bridge Mac.
But, there are some things I can't figure out.
For starters, how the heck do you power off the thing, or restart, without removing the power and the battery? On modern Macs, I can simply press and hold the power button for a while to power off. With this Lombard, that doesn't work. I also found some information that shift-fn-ctrl-power is supposed to restart. That doesn't work either.
Second, when I hard power off and restart, it will go from the 9.2.2 startup disk being selected back to the 10.4 one. Is this a "feature"? Is there a way to keep it booting to the same startup disk always unless I tell it otherwise?
Along those lines, what key sequence allows selecting the startup disk at startup time? I found information that it is supposed to be option, but that doesn't work.
Help appreciated.
BTW, some other interesting factoids about Lombards.
I have 10 of them I lowball bid on over the years and collected. Of the 10, 6 or fully functional, 1 has disk issues, and 3 are dead in some way or another. These things seem pretty resilient.
Of the 12 batteries I have for these, only one will retain any charge. I have some Dell Latitude D600 / 600m systems from just 4 years later and about half my batteries still hold _some_ charge. But you can still buy new batteries for these and they aren't that expensive.
I'm loving this thing because it lets me do so much:
- Can boot to 10.4 and os 9.
- 10.4 can AFP to my High Sierra machine (but apparently don't format it APFS or that ability will be gone).
- It's got SCSI so I can read / write SCSI disks
- It's got USB so I can read / write USB disks
- It can read and write both HFS and HFS+ disks
- At 1024x768 screen size at millions of colors, it is enough to work with comfortably, and I can add on a second external screen if need be.
Unless I'm missing something, this seems like the perfect bridge Mac.
But, there are some things I can't figure out.
For starters, how the heck do you power off the thing, or restart, without removing the power and the battery? On modern Macs, I can simply press and hold the power button for a while to power off. With this Lombard, that doesn't work. I also found some information that shift-fn-ctrl-power is supposed to restart. That doesn't work either.
Second, when I hard power off and restart, it will go from the 9.2.2 startup disk being selected back to the 10.4 one. Is this a "feature"? Is there a way to keep it booting to the same startup disk always unless I tell it otherwise?
Along those lines, what key sequence allows selecting the startup disk at startup time? I found information that it is supposed to be option, but that doesn't work.
Help appreciated.
BTW, some other interesting factoids about Lombards.
I have 10 of them I lowball bid on over the years and collected. Of the 10, 6 or fully functional, 1 has disk issues, and 3 are dead in some way or another. These things seem pretty resilient.
Of the 12 batteries I have for these, only one will retain any charge. I have some Dell Latitude D600 / 600m systems from just 4 years later and about half my batteries still hold _some_ charge. But you can still buy new batteries for these and they aren't that expensive.