Sort of a conquest...

[onlyonemac]

Hi!

I've been trying to find a way to fix my Mac, espescially after TWO large parcels failed to arrive , when I remembered this old PC guy that Dad knew.

Sure enough he had a SCSI hard disk to spare (it's around 500 MB-woohooo!) and a PCI card to connect it to a PC so I could get data onto it even though the Mac currently doesn't have a floppy drive. Man this thing is faaaaaaaast!

But this guys really amazing too. Every room has got something of interest in it, and his loft is like heaven! There was a stack of about FIVE Compaqs (not sure which ones they were), and around another ten in his home office. He had a stack of draws filled with all sorts of expansions cards and wot-not (including an SCSI RAID card pulled from a server, which had 4 GB of RAM on it and a whole CPU!). And then there was a pile of boxes filled with hard disks and floppy drives (PC ones only, sorry), and the remains of "a £1000 laptop which the girls spilled water over".

He also had this rather unique PC (dont' know what brand it was) which apparently had TWO Pentiums (not dual core, but rather two cores LOL) and used SCSI as it's main onboard hard disk interface (when last did we see a PC with SCSI?). Well, that was before the mice moved in :-/ .

Then there was this really cute little machine which I've got my eyes on. He said I could "take as much as I want", since he was going to trash most of it some time or another, but Mom's already freaking over the computers which we've currently got.

Anyway, the Mac's working like a beauty. I've put 7.5 on it, which is my first Macintosh system upgrade. It was a bit of a job to load all the data onto the hard disk, but I got it done in about a day (it should have been quicker). The drive's internal at the moment, but apparently this guy's gonna send me an external enclosure soon so that it's easier to connect it to the PC when I want to do a backup.

Thanks,

onlyonemac

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Sounds like a conquest to me, good job of it too.

 

[genie_mac]

Congrats, sound like you did well! Like having found a little bit of heaven

Mind you, that dual processor PC isn't really anything special. A lot of NT / Linux servers used dual Pentiums, and SCSI was/is common on x86 platform servers as well. I still have such a mobo lying around but can't use it because I don't have the power supply for it Pity as it would really help me with the transfer of files between my Windows systems and my Macs.

 

[LCGuy]

And you finally got a SCSI drive for the LC...way to go!

 

[Cosmo]

Good job there! Glad you found the SCSI HDD (the ones i found, were not as large as you found).

The floppy drives will be on their way this week (let's hope they are reparable).

 

[onlyonemac]

You haven't sent yet?

And what happened to the System 6 files too?

 

[cb88]

Dual pentium machines aren't terribly uncommon... I have a dual Pentium Pro 300Mhz Tyan Thunder 2 ATX board I mean to have uniserver recap someday. I have it running on IDE but it has a SCSI controller and a pretty fancy OPL2SA3 sound chip as well (only Windows, BeOS and NetBSD seem to get along with it) ...I put a radeon 9800 pro se in it as well.

I suppose I should drop one of my 147Gb SCA drives in it and see how that works...

As far as SCSI drives go.. the older ones almost always make interesting noises.

 

[redrouteone]

I've only seen one multi processor Pentium system, and that was a DataGeneral Aviion. It was also NUMA instead of SMP, so that made it rather interesting.

I have seen plenty of multi processor Pentium Pro and later systems. Which really makes since as it was not until the PPro that Intel started getting serious about the high end market. Back in the day I used to have a Dual Pentum Pro 180MHz system. It was the bomb. It was so cool having and SMP system.

I have heard of multiprocessor 486 systems, but have never seen one.

 

[CelGen]

Dual 486 requires some crazy hardware hacks and a tuned OS to work. You never saw them in the wild. They were stupid expensive and required crazy hacks to make work.

 

[bigmessowires]

I've put 7.5 on it, which is my first Macintosh system upgrade. It was a bit of a job to load all the data onto the hard disk, but I got it done in about a day (it should have been quicker).

How did you format it as a Macintosh volume from the PC? And copy Mac files to it?

 

[genie_mac]

Actually I have a similar setup for getting data onto my external SCSI drive.

I connect the drive to my WinXP box (PCI SCSI card with 25pin external connector on the back) and use TransMac software to access the drive. Works grand so far, but I haven't tried formatting the external yet (it does give the option of formatting HFS and HFS+).

Works with any external drive (ZIP etc) but usual SCSI stuff applies (no hot swap obviously etc...).

 

[redrouteone]

Dual 486 requires some crazy hardware hacks and a tuned OS to work. You never saw them in the wild. They were stupid expensive and required crazy hacks to make work.

I was doing some reading last night and The Compaq SystemPro, which is considered the first server class PC, had dual 386/486 CPUs. In fact you could mix them, 486 and a 386.

It used Asymmetric Multiprocessing Processing. Basically the second CPU was an offload engine, there wasn't much OS support for it.

It was expensive, started at $16K in 1989 dollars, that is about $30K in todays dollars. So I can't imagine they sold many of them.

 

[onlyonemac]

I've put 7.5 on it, which is my first Macintosh system upgrade. It was a bit of a job to load all the data onto the hard disk, but I got it done in about a day (it should have been quicker).

How did you format it as a Macintosh volume from the PC? And copy Mac files to it?

I used a SCSI PCI card which I got at the same time as the hard drive (I think I already said this in the first post). I used a useful hard drive imaging utility called "HDD RawCopy" (or something like that) to create a raw image of the drive under Windows. I then used a Macintosh emulator called SoftMac (it's the only one I can find that will emulate a raw hard disk image as a SCSI drive; Basilisk II just makes at a "disk drive") to format the disk image and install the basic system software. I then wrote the prepared disk image back onto the hard disk.
I still use pretty much the same procedure for any serious reformatting or reinstalling procedures (and I still make images the same way for backup purposes), but I now also use Linux to copy a few files onto or off of the hard drive, since I have installed the required packages to allow native support for hfs volumes. Basilisk II on Linux will also allow me to select the SCSI device as a SCSI device in the emulator.

By the way, the guy never sent me the external enclosure, so unfortunately it's still a bit of a job to connect the drive to the PC. I have to disassemble both the Mac and the PC every time I want to copy just the odd file here and there. I usually keep a collection of files and then, when there are enough (or when my next backup is due), I copy them across.