Mac OS Classic forum: G4 Disaster

While it was great in its day, may I ask why you didn't move to current (and cheap today) DVDRW?

But to your questions. Yes there are SCSI to USB adapters but I find most owners to want more support than what you get from a cable/box adapter. That is while I can find the adapters (Amazon, Macally) I think you need more than that. As you may know (maybe you don't?) such support is hard to find and rarely free.

Is there any chance the person who has helped you with the G4 over the years can pitch in a little?
Bob

Thanks for the reply Bob. Insofar as Mag Opt is concerned and as someone who has made a long study on the longevity of media, I came to the conclusion that MO was almost certainly going to outlast the DVD media.

But, of course, time moves on, and MO has lost its place in the market. This still makes no difference to the fact that I have much material stored on MO media and need to retrieve it in some for or other. maybe just transfer the lot to external hard drives. One of my problems will be to see if the drivers for these MO systems are still around, although they will often boot themselves.

My other question related to using an alternative HD on this G4. Can an external drive be used if the normal internal HD space is empty. Can't see why not, but would like some feed back.

Many thanks

Peter

Yes, there is no requirement for the internal drive bays to be populated, however, in order to boot the G4 you will need to have the external connected with a Firewire cable, USB will not boot the G4.

If you still have the original disks for this machine, then any G4 can be formatted and have System 9 installed on it.

The G4 used standard IDE drives, nothing Apple specific, so all you would need is an external Firewire enclosure to be up and running again. Set the jumpers to Master and you will be able to boot from that drive once you have install a working OS onto it.

Macsales.com sell the firewire enclosures at a reasonable price

P

It was in the late 80's and I was working in aerospace at the time. Such studies were interesting but as you found, tech moves on pretty fast. I see mrmacfixit has noted firewire from macsales so that's covered.

I see my memory is pretty good about the 80's at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive

If this was the common 650MB disc then you may have noticed those 8GB memory sticks over the last year selling for about 9.99. If I recall the MO media cost more than that.

Good luck in retrieving your content and if you need another clue, my friend has had some luck connecting these things to a PC booting Linux. Once on that he copies the content to DVD or memory sticks.
Bob

Thank you for all of that Bob. I can now move forward with the retrieval job. Then I can write to people again - all of my addresses are buried in there in FileMaker pro - very clever!!
And here am I writing articles on backing up data
Peter