Hey! It's me again, back to struggle with my borky systems!
I'd recently found my mini G4 1.42 again. It set up fine last time, but I had only a small drive to play with at the time so didn't make much use of it. Its optical drive is broken so IIRC I did the initial install in target disk mode.
So, I waited to long to buy an OWC SSD and didn't pay close attention to the fact that their current "Legacy" drives are only for desktop use. I ordered some generic low-profile SATA connverters for 44-pin IDE, but had a night of agonizing flakiness as installs would hang. Subsequent boots saw the new drive losing capacity and partitions. It started being seen by the system as 512GB, turned into 128GB, and eventually 7.9GB... So I'm guessing that this adaptor - which has no switches or jumpers - isn't adapting well enough for what the system expects. So I ordered a cheap NOS 160GB rotational drive instead.
Why I gravitated to the OWC was that it sounds like their drives are intended for use in systems which weren't initially available with SSDs, with better wear-leveling and garbage collection in the drive itself. I don't know how well that compares in practice, but that's a concern I'd had with using SSDs in my old macs.
So hopefully I'll set this up again soon with dual-boot 9.2/10.4 systems. The old X partition for using old NI Intakt and Kompakt sampler instruments and other ancient PPC stuff I have.
One detail I noticed is that Ross's CD does sort of boot from an external FireWire drive, but then it fails to load the image. I get the "missing drive" icon, but it's the OS 9 version from the CD. I'll probably make a USB stick to install everything next week or so when the drive arrives. Meanwhile I'm going to try to erase this 512GB OWC on my Linux box and maybe try it in my FW800 with the desktop-style adaptor it came with.
