[skullguise]

Have a friend who bought a business, came with several old Powermac G3's. Small local network, 4 machines, not connected to internet.

He has some data on it he needs to back up, about 1/2 a gig worth (2 files @ 256M each). None of the machines have CD-R's, they have Zip drives but they are 100M drives.

I was able to install a PCI USB card in one machine; the hardware is recognized, but the USB functionality is still not working. It LOOKS like it needs USB drivers loaded from the OS install CD.

My friend can't find the CD. He's trying to contact the original owner to see if he knows where it is/they are.

The OS on that machine is 9.2.2; the other machines are 8.6.

I can borrow a 9.2.1 OS CD to see about installing/adding in the USB drivers.

My questions are:

- Do you know if I can use the 9.2.1 OS CD to add USB to the 9.2.2 OS?
- If I get it working, can I use a flash drive formatted for a PC (I would assume FAT or FAT32) in the Mac (IE, can I initialize it for Mac use)?

I'm also looking at other options, but need to either find hardware or need to confirm something is workable.

- Find a SCSI CD-R and compatible software
- Find someone with a newer Mac with CD-R drive to connect on the network and back up the data - can this work?

Any info appreciated. I've started to look online, more at the file sharing with newer and older Mac OS's concept. But I'm hopefully close with the USB solution, so wanted to see if that would work.

Thanks,

Todd - skullguise

 

[flashnolan]

You could pull the hard drive and put it into a windows machine. Once the machine loads image the hard drive and save as an image. There are many mac emulators out there. Get a .ROM BIOS image (legally) and point the emulator to this image file. The emulator will let you exchange files between the emulated mac and windows machine.

Another thought I have is networking the machine. I know OS 9 will support SMB. Make a windows share on your windows machine and point your mac to SMB://windowsmachine/c$ or wherever the share is. You may have to turn SMB support on. It has been a while since I used OS 9.

 

[jellojoe]

I'm not familiar with the old mac's, but FTP client is definitely available. So you could get another machine on the network that's capable of running an FTP server (OS X has this included) and just upload everything to that machine via FTP.

 

[dvessel]

See if Personal web sharing is enabled. Look inside the control panels. If it's not there, open up the extension manager. Conflict Catcher was popular so it could be in the place of the extensions manager. Enable it and restart. There may be an extension + control panel. OS 9 often had a bunch of inits (extension) that had to be enabled together but for web sharing, it shouldn't be more than the two or less.

In order to have the Mac see the PC formatted flash drive, you need "PC Exchange" control panel and init but I'd skip that. Just enable the web server on the mac, place the files in the proper directory and open a browser from the remote machine.

BTW, FTP client isn't installed by default and finding one now may be tricky. Also, smb was never supported natively. I remember it being a third party product.

 

[jellojoe]

Quote:

Originally Posted by dvessel /img/forum/go_quote.gif BTW, FTP client isn't installed by default and finding one now may be tricky. Also, smb was never supported natively. I remember it being a third party product.

Fetch 4 is still available at fetchsoftworks.com with free trial.

 

[vagarach]

Just buy a cheap $30 drive enclosure, take out the drives, and connect that to a modern mac (quickest) or install a HFS driver (so windows can read the data on the drive, Mediafour | MacDrive) for windows and just copy the data over.

Or just get a firewire enclosure (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817145403) and put a $30 cd writer in it (I should have thought of that first

)

 

[hempcamp]

Must be beige G3s if they don't have built-in USB?

Easiest thing to do is enable personal web sharing (available on 8.6 and OS 9). No new software to install or hardware to purchase. Just put the Macs on any network with your PC and drop the files to share into the web sharing folder, then get them via browser with the attached pc.

--Chris

 

[flashnolan]

Quote:

Originally Posted by dvessel /img/forum/go_quote.gif BTW, FTP client isn't installed by default and finding one now may be tricky. Also, smb was never supported natively. I remember it being a third party product.

Are you sure? I remember my mac friend installing OS 9.1 out of the box and being able to enable SMB.

 

[skullguise]

Thanks for the help, everyone.

I've found an OS 9.2.1 CD, and a no-longer-used copy of PC MAcLan. It's easier to put the PC (my frioend's laptop) on the network of Apple machines, than it is to move the Apple machines. Just the way they are set up.

Messing any more with hardware is probably not an easy answer, as _I_ can do it, but my friend cannot, and he will need to replicate this process at least one more time.

But it looks like I have several options now, and at least one will surely work.

Thanks again!