PowerBook 100

#1 Tue, 30 Sep 2008 - 03:33 68kMLA

I just received my PB100. It came with a power adapter and floppy drive. It has 20mb harddrive. The screen has a couple of lines on it. It boots to a flashing disk. I tried to load in an O.S., but there was no hardrive showing. I took it apart and put in a 240mb hardrive out of a Duo. It boots to a happy Mac and then reboots over and over again? Something to get sorted out. I was happy to see the floppy drive and ac adapter work fine. The overall condition is very good. It is my earliest powerbook!!

#2 Tue, 30 Sep 2008 - 06:02 68kMLA

Nice get! You'll probably need to install a compatible OS on that new HD; it's likely that whatever you had for the Duo won't quite be what the 100 wants. Then you'll be ready for oodles of retrocomputing goodness.

#3 Tue, 30 Sep 2008 - 16:16 68kMLA

Would it restart over and over like that with the wrong system enabler file? I think that happened to me back in the day with my PB160. No SCSI disk mode on PB100's, right?

#4 Tue, 30 Sep 2008 - 20:06 68kMLA

The opposite, the PB100 were initially the only PBs with SCSI disk mode,

#5 Thu, 2 Oct 2008 - 07:41 68kMLA

I am going to try a different hardrive. The one out of the Duo seems to have problems. The PB100 had an extra ram chip in it. It turned out to be 6mb!!! So this PB100 is maxed out with a total of 8mb!!! It should fly with O.S.7.0.1 !!

#6 Thu, 2 Oct 2008 - 19:02 68kMLA

The PowerBook 100 is a neat little beast. I liked mine, before its ancient 20MB hard drive bit it

. I would've scrounged up another disk if it weren't so difficult to find batteries for the things, because they're Duo-sized with a full compliment of ports, and their keyboards are light years beyond what the Duos had (which is funny 'cause the 100 is years older).

What would really be nice for those old drives is a program that can run a full factory low-level format on the thing to reallocate bad sectors and rewrite any servo data that may have degraded after decades of use.