Mac OS 9 Lives

Mac OS 9 Discussion => Hardware => Topic started by: garyed055 on November 05, 2018, 12:14:20 PM

Title: Need help with Powerbook Wallstreet
Post by: garyed055 on November 05, 2018, 12:14:20 PM
Hi all

I need help with my Wallstreet I just finished getting it running again (Had to replace the system board) But there is no CD-ROM drive and no OS on the hard disk. I have a CF PCMCIA adapter card but having no luck creating a bootable CF card to install the OS on the HD. Please help

Gary
Title: Re: Need help with Powerbook Wallstreet
Post by: FdB on November 05, 2018, 01:19:09 PM
Might consider an external (SCSI) CD-ROM drive or get an internal one installed. OR maybe put your HD in another machine and install the OS there… and then move it back to your PB.

I’ve no expereince with the CF card OS-install “adventures” but perhaps someone else(?) here may be able to help with that. (I’m not so sure that it would work.) Might be able to “connect” it via SCSI disk mode, with another SCSI Mac… and approach it in that way?

There’s my two cents, “shot from the hip”.

Without a CD-ROM drive… you’re going to have some  fun. Best of luck. ;)
Title: Re: Need help with Powerbook Wallstreet
Post by: garyed055 on November 05, 2018, 06:05:36 PM
Hi

I actually got it. The 9.2.2 image you guys have on the site here did the trick. created the CF card and installed on the HD.
Title: Re: Need help with Powerbook Wallstreet
Post by: FdB on November 05, 2018, 09:58:06 PM
Congrats!!!

Do please forgive my earlier “negativity”. Would you please provide a little more detailed account
of just how you achieved this… for those that might want... or eventually need
that same “fix - workaround”? Thanks.
Title: Re: Need help with Powerbook Wallstreet
Post by: garyed055 on November 06, 2018, 05:02:14 AM
certainly my friend

This is kind of complicated, I downloaded the 9.2.2 image and created the CD-ROM using the MAC OS utility program on my 2007 Mac Mini, next I created a .DMG image using the same program followed by using ETCHER to flash the .DMG image to the CF Card. For the Wallstreet I used a PCMCIA to CF Adapter I found on ebay for $2.36

Gary
Title: Re: Need help with Powerbook Wallstreet
Post by: refinery on November 06, 2018, 06:13:53 PM
thats fascinating to me because I was never able to get CF card adapters working in my machine for booting. I can get them to work like a thumb drive, and copy files on and off, but to my knowledge, it was not possible to boot off them. only works if i insert it after the machine has booted. something to do with device-level drivers and apple's built-in overrides those on the card.
i will have to look into this as i would love to be able to boot my machine off the CF card. i have had problems with my ATA-SD Card adapter.
Title: Etcher / CF card
Post by: FdB on November 07, 2018, 07:39:58 PM
Hey R...

Perhaps this is the "Etcher" of which he doth spoke... https://www.balena.io/etcher/

("Complicated" Mac OS version of course.) :o
Title: Re: Need help with Powerbook Wallstreet
Post by: refinery on November 17, 2018, 08:50:40 PM
while i could not get etcher to do quite what i wanted, it did point me in the right direction in terms of using the command line to do what i wanted. I'm now booting off an 8GB CF card in my Wallstreet. Doesnt seem as fast as the internal ATA bus though, I was hoping for at least equivalent performance. Its a SanDisk Extreme card, supposedly capable of 60MB/Sec.

it was also very interesting and insightful to see the various tiny little disk driver partitions Mac OS creates on a legacy disk.