IDE or SCSI for SSD in PowerMac G3 BW

[futriot]

Hi all, I can't beleive I just stumbled onto this forum today and not earlier, amazing!

I wonder if anyone can help me, I have a refburshied Power Mac G3 B&W running OS 8.6 with Rev2 board as CMD chip is 646U2-402, the two drives are 68pin SCSI connected to a Adaptec AHA-2940U2B 68pin PCI SCSI Controller Card.

What I would like to do is add an SSD so I can clone the SCSI drives via disk copy on the G3 and add the image to the SSD for backup and eventually switch the SSD as a master, replacing SCSI drives.

The two options I have is either

A: Startech IDE2SSD converter, that I need to purchase and then utilise the Ultra ATA connector with a correct IDE cable

B: Purchase an Internal SCSI connector, HPDB 68 Female to IDC 50 Female, plug that into an AztecMonsterII SCSI to SSD I got a while ago, I originally purchased the AztecMonsterII for my Quadra 800 back in 2013 and hasn't been used, taken well care of though this will be the first time.

What I would like to know is, which route would be best efficient, I feel as the board is a rev2 it should be able to handle both SCSI drives and IDE as the SSD or is it best to keep it all SCSI and see if the connector works from a 50pin to 68pin?

Also with the SSD drive, do I format it as HFS+ on the PC with a third party program and will the Mac G3 read it as a slave? Or do I need to setup an image via sheepshaver?

Thanks

 

[phunguss]

You have two options:
1. An IDE to SSD adapter on one of the internal IDE chains, read this thread for some caveats.
2. A PCI SATA card, read this thread for caveats.

 

[futriot]

You have two options:
1. An IDE to SSD adapter on one of the internal IDE chains, read this thread for some caveats.
2. A PCI SATA card, read this thread for caveats.

Thank you for the reply, and pointing me the that info.

Haha wow, that was a mission you two had last year, glad it all worked out. So that answers my question, I will go with the Startech.

Regarding formatting, I can simply use a third party on the PC and format the SSD to HFS+ also the SSD is 500gb, is that too large even if its formatted to the correct size? Thanks again

 

[futriot]

All good, I found another thread that covers using a 500gb SSD

 

[speakers]

FYI: my G3 B&W uses both solutions. The IDE/SATA adapter is from OWC (as is the SSD) and I have a SiL3112 PCI/SATA card hosting a 1TB spinner.

The B&W is less fussy than other G3s and it'll happily use and boot Classic MacOS, OSX and Linuxes from volumes using either solution.

You can format/partition your 500GB SSD on the G3 itself. I'm not sure about MacOS 8.6 per se but 9.2 will be fine. You may need a patched Drive Setup. I may resort to FWB Hard Disk Toolkit in for oddball drives.

 

[futriot]

Hey all, thanks for the help, much appreciated!

I managed to setup the SSD inside the Powermac G3 and it reads, formatted it on the G3 as a new drive.
so now I would like the SSD to be the main bootable drive.

Though I am now faced with another hurdle.

The two main drives are SCSI, I am trying to clone them, and disk copy has a limit of 2gb
both drives are 9 gig, I tried to drag and drop the drive folders from desktop to the ssd like you can with OS 7.5 as this is OS 8.6 though during halfway the system didn't like it and wanted a reboot, the SCSI drive was making some mechanical noises while copying, thankfully after rebooting everything was fine.
So I don't want to try that again on the off chance it causes issues with the scsi drives.

Is it possible to use disk copy and create smaller images from different folders at 2gig then merge the images back into one image on the SSD so it is bootable, or does anyone have another solution.

Thank you

 

[speakers]

I'm not sure exactly how you're doing this and why you're seeing a 2GB limit .. that's the max HFS volume size.

What I would do is to freshly install a system on to an HFS+ volume on the SSD and boot into that. I'd install MacOS 9.2. (Actually, I'd install OSX Tiger as well but that's probably overkill for you. )

I'd then drag files/folder from your SCSI drives onto the SSD boot volume (or secondary volume) using Finder. This may be slow but you can do it in bite-size (!) chunks of folders and re-do anything that fails since it sounds like you may have some bad SCSI blocks to contend with.

 

[futriot]

I'm not sure exactly how you're doing this and why you're seeing a 2GB limit .. that's the max HFS volume size.

What I would do is to freshly install a system on to an HFS+ volume on the SSD and boot into that. I'd install MacOS 9.2. (Actually, I'd install OSX Tiger as well but that's probably overkill for you. )

I'd then drag files/folder from your SCSI drives onto the SSD boot volume (or secondary volume) using Finder. This may be slow but you can do it in bite-size (!) chunks of folders and re-do anything that fails since it sounds like you may have some bad SCSI blocks to contend with.

Thanks for your reply, normally I would do this though mine is a little different.

From what I understand is, Disk Copy has a 2gig file size limit for the images.

This is system is a refurbished G3 for video game audio and sound design, and built to run on 8.6, reason I want to clone the drive is due to everything installed, mainly all the digdesign stuff and rare audio software, though a lot of it is within the system files. It was refurbished from a friend in America who used to work for Digdesign in the 90's and recently retired his Macintosh refurbish business, sold everything and unfortunately can't provide any assistance. So it's essential I clone the two SCSI drives, though making sure I don't cause issues in the process.

 

[speakers]

Do a fresh install of 8.6 on the SSD, boot to it and copy stuff. I don't Disk Copy can help you.

 

[futriot]

Do a fresh install of 8.6 on the SSD, boot to it and copy stuff. I don't Disk Copy can help you.

Yeah good advice, so with the Quadra 800 I was able to create a system 7.5.5 using Basilisk loaded up the BlueScSi, works like a charm. Can I do the same thing on sheepshaver as I don't have OS 8.6 install unless I somehow place apple legacy iso on the SSD in the G3 then that could work?