u/jblakey

It's got buttons for everything! From when the world was a simpler place.

Even the battery still holds some charge!

I wonder who made those Novus models?

Anyone collecting?

The client was great, and waited for me to get my sh#t together. It's nice to have it finally done.

I was trying to get rid of an older phone on Facebook Marketplace and 100 bucks (the original price I posted) was too low. The number of people who wanted me to drive 30+ minutes to deliver my $100 dollar phone was crazy. This guy took the cake, though.

It's not like the description said "KEMPTVILLE ONLY" in all caps.

TLDR: it didn't work out.

Not the snappiest apple in the world, but not mealy and quite delicious! I give it 4 out of 5 apples.

Doesn't match my Indigo iMac, but hey, it was free!:). It's interesting that it looks like they shipped with with multiple different colored sleeves. Nice touch!

I didn't know about bumpmesh.com until recently. Really cool stuff!

I had a 128GB M.2 SATA drive that I scrounged out of an old (2016) laptop, so I ordered a cheap SATA to 44 pin enclosure. The Mini saw the drive right away (nice change from putting a SATA SSD in my G3 iMac).

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Downloaded a Leopard image from archive.org, and after a bit of goofing around in OpenFirmware, I got my USB to boot and install.

Mostly I'm just posting this in case it helps anyone out in the future. I ran into a few wrinkles getting this to work, and if I don't write it down, I won't remember:)

I pulled an Indigo iMac G3/500 with slot-loading CD out of the electronic recycling a few months ago. It booted right up, and still had the original 20GB Maxtor IDE HD in it. Two system partitions, one for OS 9 and one with OS X on it, both 6G.

Everything runs fine - CD works (and ejects), HD seemed fine (but a bit noisy). It was in really good condition for being about 25 years old. 192M RAM.

I immediately started thinking about upgrading it to a solid-state storage of some kind. I've got a stack of small (128/256) SSDs handy, so i figured I'd use one of those.

After doing a bit of reading, I ordered the Startech IDE2SAT2 IDE to SATA converted (the red one that people have reported success using). That didn't work for me at all. I tried multiple SSDs, multiple non-SSD SATA disks, every jumper position possible. The system would never see the drive.

I ran across another post that mentioned the Kingwin ADP-06 as being a possibility. One post (that I can no longer find) suggested it might work because it can run at a worse, slower speed than the Startech one.

I ordered one from Amazon, slammed it in, and with the first SSD that I tried (an old Samsung 250GB 860 EVO) I was able to "Initialize" it and create partitions. OS 9.2.2 installed to it as well, using an image I grabbed from https://www.macintoshrepository.org/23373-mac-os-9-2-2-boot-kit-for-booting-your-g3-g4-from-an-usb-stick . I used Balena Etcher on my Macbook to create a bootable USB disk using an old, no-name USB2 thumbdrive. I kept the jumper on the card in the same place it shipped at, in the B-A position.

However, on reboot, I couldn't boot from the new partition. I had neglected to size it to 8192 MB or less.

I re-initialized the drive, created a single 8G (8192 megabytes) partition, installed to that, and it works!

Strangely, booting now takes an extra 45 seconds or so, until the boot drive is found, I guess. Also, I get to see a blinking "?" folder for a second or two sometimes, and then the system folder is found and the boot goes fine. Just a fun little heart attack every so now and then:)

Here are a few more wrinkles I thought I should share:

1. Trying to copy from an ISO image mounted with the "Virtual CD/DVD Utility" freezes the system. Mounting it with Toast instead and then doing the copy works fine. Weird.
2. For some reason, given how many ControlStrip modules are installed by default, Apple chose not to install the CD control. They make you install it. It's in the "CD Extras" folder.
3. Sometimes, maybe most times, if I boot with my OS9.2 Boot Kit USB in, the system will auto-boot from it, and then not mount my internal drive. I thought we had to go through OpenFirmware to get it to boot from USB. Weird.
4. If anyone is looking for the magic command to boot from USB using OpenFirmware, boot the Mac holding down command-option-o-f, then type in "boot usb0/disk@1:,\\:tbxi" and hit enter. That's a zero after "usb".
5. I don't know what the jumper on the Kingwin card does. It has three letters, B, A, and C. It's probably something like Master vs Cable-Select, but I haven't found any documentation on it anywhere.

A really nice A21e, original everything. It had been a while since I've heard a hard drive:)

Really nice build, actually. The screen is still very nice.