Remote controlling G4 MacMini running Unisyn on my Mac Studio

[James Steele]

Well I should have just Googled. PowerPC Macs can't boot from USB devices according to CCC.

I'm pretty sure I used to do this, but not with a CCC clone, but rather a SuperDuper clone. This is a really interesting adventure James - worthy of a YT series, since I'm sure you have the time!

That would be nice. Everything I find on the net says you can't boot G4 Macs off of USB. Did you do this with a G4 or G5? I may see Macintosh Garden has a PPC version of Super Duper out there.

[cuttime]

That would be nice. Everything I find on the net says you can't boot G4 Macs off of USB. Did you do this with a G4 or G5? I may see Macintosh Garden has a PPC version of Super Duper out there.

I did it with a G5 using the free version of SuperDuper.

[James Steele]

That would be nice. Everything I find on the net says you can't boot G4 Macs off of USB. Did you do this with a G4 or G5? I may see Macintosh Garden has a PPC version of Super Duper out there.

I did it with a G5 using the free version of SuperDuper.

Cool... well nothing ventured, nothing gained. It will be interesting to see if the G4 works. I downloaded the correct version of Super Duper of their site... free version... and am in the middle of doing the copy. It's going to take a while. It is encouraging that it didn't give me the warning that it would not be bootable and in fact it implies from the screen shot that it's going to make it bootable. We shall see. Big thing is that maybe it just doesn't take into account the USB limitation?

I'll report back what happens. Be really nice if it could boot from this drive.

bootable.jpg (228.8 KiB) Viewed 30003 times

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Love that brushed aluminum and gummy candy interface!

[James Steele]

Love that brushed aluminum and gummy candy interface!

Haha... honestly that's the fun part about this. LOL... instant nostalgia. You know, I have a Mac SE over on my bookshelf that one of these days I'm going to see if it boots up. System 9!! Hehehe

[James Steele]

Actually don't think Super Duper worked. When it was all finished Startup Disk doesn't show it available as one of the choices.

My most economical option maybe be to contact the seller as he had two for sale and when I bought the first he offered to throw the second one in for $20. I ought to just set up a redundant box and then set it away for safe keeping. Ugh.

[cuttime]

Actually don't think Super Duper worked. When it was all finished Startup Disk doesn't show it available as one of the choices.

My most economical option maybe be to contact the seller as he had two for sale and when I bought the first he offered to throw the second one in for $20. I ought to just set up a redundant box and then set it away for safe keeping. Ugh.

D'oh!!!

[mikehalloran]

Well I should have just Googled. PowerPC Macs can't boot from USB devices according to CCC.

I'm pretty sure I used to do this, but not with a CCC clone, but rather a SuperDuper clone. This is a really interesting adventure James - worthy of a YT series, since I'm sure you have the time!

Nope. PPCs can boot from Firewire, SCSI and networked externals, not USB. With Intel Macs that changed to USB (FW wasn't supposed to work but sometimes did), Network and eSATA.

CCC and SD! are APIs for Disk Utility (and now Time Machine). Neither app can do anything unsupported by Apple.

Back in my school district support days, I would make a Master Drive and clone hundreds of G3s and G4s so that every student's desktop was the same when school opened. CCC was a little faster than doing it in Terminal. The reason for not doing it over the network was so I could run Disk Utility and replace questionable HDDs first.

[James Steele]

Nope. PPCs can boot from Firewire, SCSI and networked externals, not USB. With Intel Macs that changed to USB (FW wasn't supposed to work but sometimes did), Network and eSATA.

Yeah... I'd be tempted to try the Firewire thing and dust off the enclosure I have in my closet and stick a drive in there and then clone it... see if it would work. Only problem is that I did a LOT of searching in forums and saw nothing but people having issues trying to boot G4/Leopard Macs from Firewire drives. Not much success... don't think I found one post by someone who did it.

All I want is a backup should my little "Unisyn box" go down. Given that I assume the drive in it is 19 years old, that day could be coming soon. My best bet would be to just call the guy that sold me this one and see if he still wants to sell me the other one for $20 like he offered. Then I'll just set it up like I did this one and stick in the closet for when the day comes that it fails. Hopefully not running the drive in the backup will help preserve it... dunno?

If I go that route though, I'll probably pop for an old Leopard installer DVD on ebay. The hack to reset the password is just a little too sketchy. I guess I'm just OCD, but don't like that the name of the admin account user directory can't be changed.

[aoresteen]

I have an old Mac Mini *somewhere* in my attic I think. I am not sure of the CPU. Might be worth setting it up just to run Unisyn 2.0 as the Windows version stopped at 1.5.

*Somewhere* I have an old KVM switch that back in the day let me switch between a Mac G4 & a PC. I know where the G4 tower is but the KVM/Mini are a mystery.

[mikehalloran]

Nope. PPCs can boot from Firewire, SCSI and networked externals, not USB. With Intel Macs that changed to USB (FW wasn't supposed to work but sometimes did), Network and eSATA.

Yeah... I'd be tempted to try the Firewire thing and dust off the enclosure I have in my closet and stick a drive in there and then clone it... see if it would work. Only problem is that I did a LOT of searching in forums and saw nothing but people having issues trying to boot G4/Leopard Macs from Firewire drives. Not much success... don't think I found one post by someone who did it.

All I want is a backup should my little "Unisyn box" go down. Given that I assume the drive in it is 19 years old, that day could be coming soon. My best bet would be to just call the guy that sold me this one and see if he still wants to sell me the other one for $20 like he offered. Then I'll just set it up like I did this one and stick in the closet for when the day comes that it fails. Hopefully not running the drive in the backup will help preserve it... dunno?

If I go that route though, I'll probably pop for an old Leopard installer DVD on ebay. The hack to reset the password is just a little too sketchy. I guess I'm just OCD, but don't like that the name of the admin account user directory can't be changed.

Finding an IDE/ATA/PATA HDD that still works is becoming quite difficult.

[James Steele]

Nope. PPCs can boot from Firewire, SCSI and networked externals, not USB. With Intel Macs that changed to USB (FW wasn't supposed to work but sometimes did), Network and eSATA.

Yeah... I'd be tempted to try the Firewire thing and dust off the enclosure I have in my closet and stick a drive in there and then clone it... see if it would work. Only problem is that I did a LOT of searching in forums and saw nothing but people having issues trying to boot G4/Leopard Macs from Firewire drives. Not much success... don't think I found one post by someone who did it.

All I want is a backup should my little "Unisyn box" go down. Given that I assume the drive in it is 19 years old, that day could be coming soon. My best bet would be to just call the guy that sold me this one and see if he still wants to sell me the other one for $20 like he offered. Then I'll just set it up like I did this one and stick in the closet for when the day comes that it fails. Hopefully not running the drive in the backup will help preserve it... dunno?

If I go that route though, I'll probably pop for an old Leopard installer DVD on ebay. The hack to reset the password is just a little too sketchy. I guess I'm just OCD, but don't like that the name of the admin account user directory can't be changed.

Finding an IDE/ATA/PATA HDD that still works is becoming quite difficult.

Yeah... I should have bought that second G4 Mac Mini for $20 as cheap insurance. It's such a shame, but as I mentioned before, reliable two-way sysex communication does not not seem possible when running Unisyn with Rosetta on an Intel Mac. Seems it needs a real G4 chip inside. I tried an Intel Mac Mini with Snow Leopard/Rosetta and it was a bust. Sysex dumps were hit and miss.

[James Steele]

There's also some hack version of Leopard out there that will supposedly support SSDs, but getting it all to work just looked to sketchy and complicated for me.

[kpvalentine]

James
Screen sharing Unisyn from my old G5 works like a charm! UNISYN LIVES!! One of the best programs ever. I set up a patch in Clockworks for my MIDI Express XT ….G5 to all Hardware Synths.