For you old school Mac people.
So I dug the Powerbook 170 out of the closet. A luxurious 10 inches of 16-grey screen. Lightning-fast OS 7.1. Maxed out at a shocking 32 megs, I think, of computational power. Retailed at a deal of $4500 in 1991. I bought it used and of unknown provenance in 1996. Warantee and maintaining resale value are, obviously, not an issue here (current e-bay auctions are selling them for as high as 15 bucks).
You see, I want to set it up as a nethack-dedicated bathroom machine, and want to salvage old e-mail and documents off of it.
Here’s the problem: in, oh, 1998? 99? it stopped recognizing the hard drive. I’ve tinkered with it a couple of times since then.
Warning-- laughingly amateur computer tinkering by a frikking art historian discussed here. Perhaps even dangerous. Kids, don’t try this at home.
What I have learned-- it has a much greater likelihood of starting up (95% success rate) just fine and finding the hard drive and everything if the case is completely open-- with the bottom half with the harddrive and major parts separated from the top half of keyboard, screen, etc. Otherwise I get the flashy system questionmark, or a very sad mac face (haven’t copied down the code, but it clear what the problem is (not finding drive)).
So question A-- what is it about having the case closed that might do this? Is a ribbon getting squished? Is something shorting out? Does the jolt of the case closing throw something off? It will be working perfectly fine until I make the mistake of putting it back together.
Question B: what’s the best way of actually getting my data off this machine and onto a newer one (no ethernet port, etc). I have had a little bit of success with modem-to-modem transferring with Z-term (when was the last time you even HEARD all of these phrases), but that’s going very slow. Floppies aren’t really big enough for what I need (Eudora folders, mostly-- I’d ideally like to copy a mirror of the whole damn hard drive). Suggestions?
Heh. I had a PB100 at one point and still think it had one of the best form factors of any laptop ever.
Doesn’t the serial line support AppleTalk of some sort?
As I recall, the 170 had a SCSI port so you could try to find some removeable media (like a Zip drive) that supports SCSI and transfer the data to that or transfer to a SCSI hard drive and then move it to a more modern (but still old) Mac with a network connection.
You could also get some backup software that does multi-floppy copies and (painfully) backup the whole disk and restore it to a floppy-equipped Mac.
The “I’ll work with my guts hanging out, but not when assembled” sounds like either a cracked trace on a PCB or a not-quite-there connection in one of the cables.
If you have a readily-opened Mac available, could you pop the hard drive into it long enough to mount it and copy what you want off of it?
I’m not real familiar with Mac guts, but this is a very popular way to salvage stuff off PC drives when the PC itself croaks.
Otherwise, you say you’re an art historian? Combine that field with historic computers and arrange the Mac’s parts in a way that works, but is artistic and leave it at that. 