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Today I installed a sonnet SATA PCI card in a G4 powermac. Then I installed a samsung SATA card. The sonnet card is known to be bootable so I though this had a real good chance of working. The card was acting wonky. Turns out its a known issue where G4s need the card's firmware reverted. I did...

Reading the title of this post, it feels like someone forgot there was a G4 Mac mini too :D Speaking of, this is really a price check post. How much do you think this old one I have might be worth? 1.25 GHz G4, 512 MB of RAM, 40 GB Hard Drive, Power cable and brick included. Boots up and runs...

So a very long time ago, when I was a wee little 14 year old, I was getting my first "modern" computer. The choice ended up being between a Performa 550 or a Macintosh TV. BTW for those curious, this was up at the ComputerTown store in Salem New Hampshire. Anyway, I was a young teen with his...

Anyone know a SMART disk checking utility for OS X, that runs on PPC? I've been using SMART Utility for years, but it looks like that is Intel only. I have a few old PPC Macs that I want to verify have no bad blocks.

MegaFiler was a database app I used on a Mac Plus back around 1992 - 1994. I have a few documents I recovered off some floppy disks but I have no way to open them. I have been able to find a copy of MegaFiler online but it crashes when you try to run it on MacOS. The oldest OS I have access to...

It's been a while since I've worked much with SCSI. I've got an external hard drive here with a bunch of files I need to copy off of it.  I'm trying the easiest way first, using my old SCSI USB adapter and trying to copy them right off, to a modern Mac. But alas, no joy. This is how this USB...

Is there a source for new batteries for these old machine? If not, is there potentially a place where you can get custom batteries made? I know my friends have gotten custom batteries made in the past for various things. And it wasn't prohibitively expensive. But that said, this half memory...

So I have this Mac IIsi that won't power on. Completely dead. I assume it needs a power supply. There's not much inside this thing to salvage. Given the limited number of components, I'm assuming the 4 chips in brackets below are the RAM right? Assuming they way, is it possible to determine...

I'm trying to erase these old PowerBook 500 drives I have. I want to zero them before I get rid of them, like I always do with modern drives. But these are a little trickier, the only way I can format them is by booting this old PowerBook off of a floppy. So I can't get Drive Setup available to...

I'm going to try to replace a failed hard drive in a powerbook 1400. The original drive is 1 GB, but of course you can't get 1 GB drives anymore. It is an ATA drive though. You can still get brand new 80 GB pata/ide drives on newegg for under $60.  But the question is... are there any issues...

I fix Macs for a living.... but generally modern Macs. I had a customer ask me if I could get some old files off her super old powerbook and I said sure I'll give it a try. So she unboxes a PowerBook 520 that has likely not been powered on in 20 years or more. I plugged it in and couldn't get...

I recently got 256 MB of RAM for my old Mac, in the form of four 64 MB chips. The RAM I already had in there was in the form of two 16 MB chips and one 32 MB.  So I have two options. I can put 288 MB of interleaved RAM in this machine... or I can put 320 MB of non-interleaved RAM in there. ...

I've been toying with the idea of setting up my email on my old machine. I consider the 8.1 volume to be this Mac's main and primary OS. I'm wondering if there are any email clients that might be able to connect to a modern mail server? I tried eudora 5.1 but when I tried to set up my account...

I think I know the answer to this, but it's been a long time so I figured I'd ask in case I'm wrong.  Totally ignoring aftermarket CPU upgrades, and only referring to original CPU cards... Are the processors in CPU Macs all interchangeable? Will the automatically work at their correct speed? I...

I need to move a whole bunch of volumes from one drive to another. I know drag and drop generally works with classic, although the desktop folder is invisible. And the other problem i've been running in to, theres no way to know which desktop folder, on which drive, a particular file on your...

I have a customer that has some very important email files on old powerbook, in the program cc:Mail. From what I've been able to tell, it started as more of a private messaging system (not email but an email like system), then it migrated over to a more traditional email program. I've tried...

When it comes to these old PCI Macs, everyone's first thought is that it can take PC100 and it should be backwards compatible. Is that true? I suspect the answer is a big definitely "NO".  If that's the case, then the question remains, where can you get RAM for these Macs, these days? I saw a...

Is this a thing? I know it's a thing with hard drives. Both the physical adapter to fit a 2.5" drive in a 3.5" bay, and also the adapter to convert laptop IDE to desktop IDE. But optical drives are much less standard than hard drives. But it would be very cool if you could get a physical adapter...

Anyone know of an app like Activity Monitor, but for classic MacOS? Something that can at least show me CPU usage of all running apps, and Ideally show me disk activity and even network activity?

So I picked up this card on eBay for $20. PCI IDE seems to be very hard to find, so I wanted to snatch it up even though it's ATA66. I hope it doesn't have the 120 GB drive limit, but if it does I'll live with it.  So I plugged the card in (to my PowerMac 7300). I hooked up a 40 GB IDE drive...