carnage

Specifications: PowerBook G3 Series ("Wallstreet").

Link: PowerBook G3 Series specifications at LowEndMac.com

Experiments.

I did a couple of experiments last night: I upgraded the B&W PowerMac to Tiger, and upgraded the Wallstreet to Panther with the help of Ryan Rempel's excellent XPostFacto.

I'd actually done the XPostFacto trick before on this same PowerBook G3, but it didn't really take. The video had problems with colors, and overall it felt pretty creaky. But this time, I used his latest stable build, XPostFacto 3.1, read through the known problems, and decided to check the "Use PatchedRagePro" as suggested.

XPostFacto is very easy to use: just download the application to your OS 9 boot drive, insert your OS X Install disc, launch XPostFacto, check off a few options as necessary, and click the "Install from CD" button. Your Mac will restart and you then follow the normal procedure to install. Total time for me was under an hour. Not bad for a 7-year-old machine with just 256MB of RAM. Which reminds me; I should see about boosting that.

The Blue & White was just a bit less trouble-free: it reported that "there were problems while installing" and suggested that I try again. A casual Google revealed that sometimes this can be due to problems reading data off the disc, and since I had a relatively ancient third-party combo drive in there, I gave it another shot. The second time was a charm.

These were both test runs. When I get those laptop drives I ordered I'll stick one in the Wallstreet and try Tiger via XPostFacto 4.0b3.

Moving just your home directory in Mac OS X.

When I upgrade my work PowerBook (a 12" G4 at 1.33 GHz), I'll be doing a clean install of Tiger. Here's how to copy over just your Home directory after backing it up somewhere else:

Mike Bombich's How to Move Your Home Directory to Another Partition

(Thanks, Chris.)

New drives for the laptops.

I was planning on getting a new hard drive for the Titanium anyway, but I was going to take that old drive out and put it into the Wallstreet, since it was quite a bit bigger (20GB vs. 4GB) and ran quieter. It would have made a great drive to try installing Tiger on, via XPostFacto. Unfortunately, it's about to die, so I went hunting for not one, but two new laptop drives.

Chris helped me get a price check on some drives, and ultimately I went for couple of 60GB 5400rpm Western Digital Scorpio drives for $80 bucks from the Dell Small Business store, which I found through dealmac. Total damage: $175 shipped. Not bad, but not as good as the $20 Western Digital 80GB desktop drives I scored last week from Best Buy.

S.M.A.R.T.

I was all set to install Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) on my 15" Titanium PowerBook G4 last night. I decided to run Disk Utility off of the install disc, just in case, and guess what it found? The 20GB drive inside was in the process of failing. Disk Utility alerted me by displaying the drive's name in red text, and filling the right-hand side of the window with a mildly scary message telling me that my drive was failing and that if possible, I should salvage my data and replace the drive:

Disk Utility wouldn't let me do anything else to the drive, either. No permissions repair or other First Aid procedures. Hard core.

I did some digging, and apparently all newer hard drives come with something called S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis & Reporting Technology), which is a self-diagnostic protocol that a drive will run regularly to track things like bad blocks and even mechanical and electronic components.

Cool. I wish it told me automatically, instead of me having to discover it like this. I now wonder if issues on my laptop drive had anything to do with The Crash of 2005, which happened when I was cloning said laptop's drive to my big FireWire drive.

UPDATE Even though it wouldn't let me run Disk Utility, the Tiger Installer Disc let me upgrade to Tiger. Go figure. Of note: Disk Utility 10.4.4 (the version that ships with Panther) and Disk Utility 10.5 (Tiger) handle failing drives differently—10.4.4 won't give you the red text and foreboding message shown above.