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Just acquired a 9500...
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Trevor Carpenter
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Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: Ventura, CA
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May 13, 2002, 01:45 PM
 
A friend just gave me a Power Macintosh 9500/150
It came with:
original processor of 150 mhz
onboard video
000 RAM
000 HD
000 CD ROM
apple keyboard
apple mouse

My friend threw in:
SCSI CD ROM drive
PCI SCSI card
2 SCSI HD (3 gig & 2 gig)

Here is my question/need for help. I was a simply a graphic design software guy in the early 90's with Macintosh computers. The last several years I have been using and building PC's, and have recently purchased a PowerBook G4. I am only using OSX.

I have rambled on with this, so that all will understand that I don't have any idea what to do with this desktop to get it up and running. I just bought some DIMM's from ebay that will work, (168 pim/ 2x 64 mg).

I have read much about my opportunities to upgrade and this really excites me, but I need to have this system simply running before I can do that.

Please help! What to I do to get it working?

Trevor Carpenter
[email protected]


AMENDMENT:
The HD's, PCI SCSI card, and CD ROM are not neccessarily Mac compatable. They came from the friend's supply of PC stuff.

[ 05-13-2002: Message edited by: Trevor Carpenter ]
     
v8q
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Join Date: Mar 2002
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May 13, 2002, 06:40 PM
 
Originally posted by Trevor Carpenter:
<STRONG>A friend just gave me a Power Macintosh 9500/150
It came with:
original processor of 150 mhz
onboard video
000 RAM
000 HD
000 CD ROM

My friend threw in:
SCSI CD ROM drive
PCI SCSI card
2 SCSI HD (3 gig & 2 gig)

Here is my question/need for help. I was a simply a graphic design software guy in the early 90's with Macintosh computers. The last several years I have been using and building PC's, and have recently purchased a PowerBook G4. I am only using OSX.

I have rambled on with this, so that all will understand that I don't have any idea what to do with this desktop to get it up and running. I just bought some DIMM's from ebay that will work, (168 pim/ 2x 64 mg).

I have read much about my opportunities to upgrade and this really excites me, but I need to have this system simply running before I can do that.

Please help! What to I do to get it working?

Trevor Carpenter
[email protected] </STRONG>

I don't really understand where you are stuck. Bare minimum you need:
working CD, disk drive and of course CPU/memory, keyboard, etc.

Get it to power up and boot from an install CD. Piece-o-cake.

HOWEVER and I am shouting here, think twice about dumping money into this thing.
If you already had a ton of money invested - and could not bear to give it up, then I would pop for a G4 processor, a IDE card, USB/FIre wire card and at least 512 meg of ram.
You would be way better off though to buy a "real" used G4 tower. You will spend about the same money but end up with a faster and supported computer.
A used G4 seems easy to find for about $800 - and you can probably do much better than that if you look around.

Better yet - just go for a new i-mac. You will be happier.
     
jeromep
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Join Date: Jan 2001
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May 15, 2002, 06:52 PM
 
I'll admit that i'm a bit rusty with my knowledge of 9500 innards, but don't they have onboard scsi? If so, I'm sure it will be 50-pin and if your scsi drives aren't 50-pin themselves you'll need to get adapters.

Ok, assuming that you have onboard SCSI and you have cabeling for the drives and have the properly hooked up, you will need to format them. Watch out for conflicting IDs. Rule of thumb, the first SCSI hard drive or the main drive you will use should be set to ID0 so the computer waits for the drive to spin up before it completes a boot sequence. They are probably not Apple drives, so you'll need to get formatter software, Apple's won't format the drives.

Of course to even start doing that you will need to get that CD-Rom hooked up. It'll need to go on the SCSI chain also. Be sure to set the CD drive's id to 3. That is the traditional address for SCSI CD-ROMs on Macs. It keeps the system and a lot of third party software happy. Oh, here is another hurdle, is it an Apple CD-ROM, because if it isn't you may not be able to boot off from it to either install an OS or to format those hard drives. Oh, remember to boot off from the CD, you will need to hold down the "C" key on startup until you see a happy mac icon. If you have a bootable OS or drive formatter CD and you don't get the happy mac and a boot up from the CD-ROM, your drive is not bootable becasue it is not an Apple CD-ROM. At that point you will have to acquire some CD-ROM drivers from a third party source. Another way to force the system to scan the bus for a bootable volume is to hold down command-option-shift-delete on startup and wait for the same happy mac icon.

I wouldn't bother even trying the SCSI PCI card. It probably won't work with the mac ever, unless it is a major brand name card and the drivers are available online. There may be a hitch with that card, it may only work after the extension for it has booted up. Of course I'm assuming that you have an operating machine with an os installed on some kind of internal drive. In other words, just because PCI is a standard and it is universal and Apple has implemented it fully and correctly, it doesn't mean that any old PCI device will work in a Mac. There generally must be drivers around to make it work.

So, your three major problems are, how are you hooking up your drives inside the machine, how do you plan on booting it to format the drives and how to you plan on installing an OS. Secondary problems include what to do with the PCI SCSI card?

Here is the order of approach for your problems.

1. Get your drives physically in the machine, assign IDs, 1 and 2 for your hard drives 3 for your CD-ROM.
2. Acquire a retail grade (not machine specific) OS install. 8.6 and higher will do fine. Acquire a retail boxed version of FWB Hard Disk Toolkit or Anubis or any other third-party formatting software. I preffer FWB, a recent version will boot your machine from CD or floppy.
3. Boot computer with formatting software CD or floppy. This is the first test if your CD-ROM is bootable. Of course, remember that booting requires that there be a valid system on the boot volume.
4a. Assuming that CD-ROM boots bootable formatting software CD, then you have an ok drive for the mac. Boot off from the OS install CD and install OS and you are on your way.
4b. Ok, so you found out that that the CD-ROM will not boot with either a held down "c" key or with the command-option-shift-delete combination. That means you really should go out and find an Apple branded CD-ROM. Go to ebay and grab anything from Apple that is SCSI. The faster the better. An Apple branded CD-ROM will work with the "c" key boot up. Now format your drives and install the OS.

You should be in business after that.
     
Trevor Carpenter  (op)
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May 15, 2002, 08:26 PM
 
Originally posted by jeromep:
<STRONG>I'll admit that i'm a bit rusty with my knowledge of 9500 innards...

...You should be in business after that.</STRONG>
WOW, thanks a lot. This is going to be a great help. I did find out that teh SCSI PCI card is and Adaptec 2940UW, there is an article on lowendmac.com that shows me how to install it. I hope it is bootable.

The SCSI drives are both the wrong size "pin"s but I have inline adapters for them.
     
Secret Vampire
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: England
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May 16, 2002, 09:03 AM
 
I'll add to this:
it is possible to format a non-apple drive using Apples disk utility, but you need to hack it slightly with resedit to stop it checking for an apple rom. http://www.macfaq.de/macfaqdaten/minifaqs/dspg.html

Booting from CD, it will only work properly with apple drives, except the PowerCD, an old external SCSI drive that uses a different driver, if you have access to a machine with a CD-rom and floppy however, it should be possible to make a boot disk with a modified version of drive setup, and a generic CD-rom driver on it, you need to delete some of the rescue tools, but I managed it for booting my PowerBook and installing to a non-apple drive from the PowerCD

To be bootable the 2940 probably will require a new rom, I don't know if it's flashable, but I think it isn't... I'd suggest using the onboard SCSI and finding someone to buy the adaptec, you could use the cash to get some other goodies like a faster CPU card...
Secret

4 Macs, 6 Amigas, 3 SparcStations, an Atari ST, an Acorn, and N+1 PCs.

I'm such a geek.
     
   
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