06-07-2010, 03:53 PM

A little background:

A client requested a file that we had backed up long ago to a floppy disk. We had used Disk Doubler on that floppy, so the only machine that could open it was this dinosaur of a Mac, with a 15-year-old SCSI hard drive, no CD burner, and the 8.6 OS.
We were able to connect this machine to our network (this alone seemed miraculous to me) but any time I attempted to move a file to the Full-Permissions folder I'd made for just such an occasion, the dinosaur would hang.
After a few tests that left us exasperated, we proposed that the best way to make this work would be to connect the hard drive via SCSI to my G5 machine, powered by a G4 machine that would also serve as a firewire-target-disc-mode external hard drive, and carbon-copy-clone the 15-year-old drive to the target disc in the G4.
I called this the "Frankintosh."
We were able to make this work (surprisingly), except that the newly-made OS 8.6 HD will not boot in the G4 machine. I've tried blessing the drive, but it's very possible I've not done so correctly. I've also tested my hardware configuration by connecting a different HD, which worked fine. The HD is set to master. From what I've researched, it is apparently possible to run 8.6 on a G4, so I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here.
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

_Josh

06-07-2010, 11:43 PM

The G4 firmware resides on the HD when installed from an OS that supports the G4. It would make more sense to set the OS8 drive as a slave and not boot from it. OS 8.6 supports USB One and you could install a USB card in the old Mac and use a Thumb drive to move the file. Strange that the network set up did not work...that would be the best way to move the file from an old Mac. Did you make active Appletalk on the OSX machine to talk to the Old Mac.

06-08-2010, 10:18 AM

Having the OS8 HD as a slave was a thought, except that we weren't sure whether or not its applications would run in OS X.
We didn't really go that far with the server-to-dinosaur connection. But thankfully someone realised that since we were able to access the HD via SCSI, we could use the dinosaur all we wanted, then transfer the expanded files to a newer machine. A little more legwork, maybe, but effective. Thanks for your help, my friend.