Cloning a PB G3 2.5" IDE Hard Drive with an SE/30?

Boot the iMac from the DVD?

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Thanks, Bunsen. But my iMac is a Nov. 2009 model (i7 QuadCore). It won't boot from a Tiger DVD. It's times like this I get frustrated with Apple. It makes logical sense for them to severe compatibility with past OS's on new hardware, since it reduces their workload. But it's a false limitation imposed on the hardware, since 2009 hardware that can run Snow Leopard technologically speaking should have the ability to boot Leopard and Tiger too. And the end result of Apple's self-serving interests is that we the consumer have to pay for it, and jump through hoops to accomplish backward compatibility that Apple so greatly disdains. Of course, this thinking is very much Steve Jobs -- the man who saved Apple and boosted my AAPL stock price into the stratosphere. And none of us here can argue about the greatness of Apple hardware and software. It's truly a Love-Hate relationship.

Anyway, there must be someone among us who has figured out how to get a hard drive formatted within Lion for use with OS 9, right? And truly, if we can figure out how to network Lion & OS9, surely there must be a way to format an external HD with OS 9 drivers and create partitions smaller than 1.07GB in Lion too. Are there few among us who use Lion on their modern Macs?

I ended up formatting the 2.5" drive in an external case connected to my G4 Cube running OS 9 via FW400. I initially used Intech's HD SpeedTools 3.6 (OS 9 edition) to format the drive into 3 partitions:

1) 650MB

2) 6.8GB

3) The remaining space

Benchmarks show a big speed bump in READs because of the optimization that the Intech driver offers. However, I had trouble booting from the drive after installing OS 9 on it. I would get the folder with the flashing "?" mark in it. So I reformatted the drive using Apple's Disk Utility, did a fresh install of OS 9, and then I could boot. It sickens me though because Intech SpeedTools is supposed to work with OS 9. I must therefore assume that it does work with OS 9, just not on a Wallstreet! Still makes me sick though. The Intech driver is faster than Apple's.

But my Sonnet 500MHz G4 card must have some problems because nothing I do will keep it from freezing. It's strange. It never freezes while the computer is booting. It only freezes once it gets to the desktop (in OS 9) and all the icons display. Sometimes it freezes right away, and other times it takes 30s, and other times it takes a couple minutes. Sometimes it will freeze when I do nothing at all. And other times it will freeze when I click around on screen.

Here are photos of the front/back sides of my Sonnet card, and my two sets of RAM:

https://picasaweb.google.com/103365672326265854011/PowerBookG3WallstreetStuff

I know the RAM is good because it works great in my stock Apple 266MHz CPU card. I even tried putting only one 64MB RAM card in the top slot of the Sonnet CPU card (some people online say that's a good test to perform), but the machine still locks up after booting to the OS 9 desktop. No freezes whatsoever when I use the 266MHz CPU card though, in either one of my two Wallstreets.

I realize this was six months ago, but did you ever try replacing the heat sink grease between the CPU and the heat sink/shield? You mentioned looking at it in a mid-thread post, but never said (I think) that you tried anything with it.

Your symptoms could be a number of things, but they're consistent with overheating, and if there's no heat sink compound actually on the CPU die (raised rectangle in center) then there's a good chance that it is overheating.

i would hook local talk cable up to both, then, use a boot cd boot the one you want the stuff copied to, use drive set up and wipe the drive, then, chooser click the other machine and just drag and drop, it may take a while, let it go over night. i just do a drag and drop with my vintage mac's all the time. then wala you will have 2 HD Booting machines with the same contents.

*edit* i'm not sure i wonder if you could use a ethernet cable… should work… might have to set some manual IP's not sure if the wallstreet has a auto switching port that will cross over… if not then you would need a cross over cable. would speed the copy up immensely

but i like like local talk, slow but very reliable and it just works!

I am now the new owner of this G4 upgrade card. My experiences with it have been different than JDW's, but also consistent with overheating. Following a pinch of curiosity, I gave the little round heatsink on the chip a little pinch and PING, off it flew, dried up grease disintegrating to dust.

I'll need to go to CVS and grab some alcohol to clean it, then I'll do it up with Ceramique 2 and we'll see how it does.

Let us know how it turns out.