Transcend PATA SSD Issues

[RustyTacoVT]

Hi All,

I'm currently using Transcend PATA SSDs (TS128GPSD300) in a couple of my old iBooks (500 and 800 Mhz G3). I had partitioned the drives to support both OS 9 and OS X installations on their own partitions. OS 9 Installs and runs beautifully on both laptops, but for whatever reason I absolutely cannot get Jaguar, Panther, or Tiger to install from their respective retail installation media. On all three versions of OSX, the errors are similar, and are caused by an inability to unmount the drives during the install process. I am also unable to unmount the drive manually from Disk Utility within the installers.

Each OS gives a similar yet slightly different error in the install log. Jaguar says the following:
_volumeFailedToUnmount - errorCode = 5 PID = -1

Googling these errors turn up nothing useful, likely because these operating systems are so old at this point.

Has anyone run into this issue before? I also have an mSATA to IDE adapter that I could try with another drive if this is a hardware issue, but I'd really like to avoid disassembling these guys again if possible.

Has anyone else experienced this before or worked around it successfully? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[DieHard]

Both G3 iBooks (both 500 and 800) should have FW400 ports...

1) Reboot one of the iBooks in "target" mode (Hold "T") upon power on

2) Connect a Firewire cable between the iBooks, the main iBook (the one NOT in target mode) will see the one in target mode as an external hard drive

3) Install OS X from the main iBook diectly to the iBook in target mode's hard drive

4) re-boot the iBook that was in target mode

This was a similar procedure...

So we put our first victim in FW (FireWire) target mode connect it to a working TI Powerbook G4, and run the famous "Diehard Instant DAW" Apple recovery (available right here from our site); and in less that 10 minutes we have a restored PowerBook G4 with an entire recording studio DAW ready to record music with...

[RustyTacoVT]

Both G3 iBooks (both 500 and 800) should have FW400 ports...

1) Reboot one of the iBooks in "target" mode (Hold "T") upon power on

2) Connect a Firewire cable between the iBooks, the main iBook (the one NOT in target mode) will see the one in target mode as an external hard drive

3) Install OS X from the main iBook diectly to the iBook in target mode's hard drive

4) re-boot the iBook that was in target mode

This was a similar procedure...

So we put our first victim in FW (FireWire) target mode connect it to a working TI Powerbook G4, and run the famous "Diehard Instant DAW" Apple recovery (available right here from our site); and in less that 10 minutes we have a restored PowerBook G4 with an entire recording studio DAW ready to record music with...

Thank you, I'll give this a shot! Appreciate the quick response.

[RustyTacoVT]

I just wanted to post a quick update to the thread in case this helps anyone else down the road...

The Target Disk method posted above worked beautifully to get OSX 10.2 installed onto the 500mhz system. It completed quickly, but upon a reboot the system never got past the blank blue screen. I even left it there for a couple of hours with no progress.

I think at this point I may just stick with OS9 on those G3 iBooks. For whatever reason, it would appear that something with this model of SSD is fundamentally incompatible with OSX.

Thanks again for the assistance, I certainly appreciate it!